Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899
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Title: Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899
Author: Various
Editor: William Jay Youmans
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, APRIL 1899 ***
Established by Edward L. Youmans
APPLETONS'
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS
VOL. LIV
NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. NO. 6.
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
APRIL, 1899.
_EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. The Stuff that Dreams are made of. By HAVELOCK ELLIS 721
II. The Best Methods of Taxation. By the Late Hon. DAVID A.
WELLS. Part I 736
III. Mental Defectives and the Social Welfare. By MARTIN W.
BARR, M. D. (Illustrated.) 746
IV. The Wheat Problem again. By EDWARD ATKINSON 759
V. The Coming of the Catbird. By SPENCER TROTTER 772
VI. Guessing, as Influenced by Number Preferences. By F. B.
DRESSLAR 781
VII. Concerning Weasels. By WILLIAM E. CRAM. (Illustrated.) 786
VIII. Care of the Throat and Ear. By W. SCHEPPEGRELL, M. D. 791
IX. The Physical Geography of the West Indies. I. The Mammals
of the Antilles. By Dr. F. L. OSWALD 802
X. Iron in the Living Body. By M. A. DASTRE 807
XI. The Malay Language. By Prof. R. CLYDE FORD 813
XII. Life on a South Sea Whaler. By FRANK T. BULLEN 818
XIII. Sketch of Manly Miles. (With Portrait.) 834
XIV. Editor's Table: Science and Culture.--Survival of the
Fittest 842
XV. Scientific Literature 845
XVI. Fragments of Science 854
XVII. Index to Vol. LIV 865
NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
72 FIFTH AVENUE.
SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, $5.00.
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for
transmission through the mails at second-class rates.
[Illustration: MANLY MILES.]
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
APRIL, 1899.
THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF.
BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.
In our dreams we are taken back into an earlier world. It is a world
much more like that of the savage, the child, the criminal, the
madman, than is the world of our respectable civilized waking life.
That is, in large part, it must be confessed, the charm of dreams. It
is also the reason of their scientific value. Through our dreams we
may realize our relation to stages of evolution we have long left
behind, and by the self-vivisection of our sleeping life we may learn
to know something regarding the mind of primitive man and the source
of some of his beliefs, thus throwing light on the facts we obtain by
ethnographic research.
This aspect of dreams has not always been kept steadily in sight,
though it can no longer be said that the study of dreams is neglected.
From one point of view or another--not only by the religious sect
which, it appears, constitutes a "Dream Church" in Denmark, but by
such carefully inquisitive investigators as those who have been
trained under the inspiring influence of Prof. Stanley Hall--dreaming
is seriously studied. I need not, therefore, apologize for the fact
that I have during many years taken note from time to time and
recorded the details and circumstances of vivid dreams when I could
study their mechanism immediately on awakening, and that I have
occupied myself, not with the singularities and marvels of
dreaming--of which, indeed, I know little or nothing--but with their
simplest and most general laws and tendencies. A few of these laws and
tendencies I wish to set forth and illustrate. The interest of such a
task is twofold. It not only reveals to us an archaic world of vast
emotions and imperfect thoughts, but by helping us to attain a clear
knowledge of the ordinary dream processes, it enables us in advance to
deal with many of the extraordinary phenomena of dreaming, sometimes
presented to us by wonder-loving people as awesomely mysterious, if
not indeed supernatural. The careful analysis of mere ordinary dreams
frequently gives us the key to these abnormal dreams.
Perhaps the chief and most frequent tendency in the mechanism of
dreaming is that by which isolated impressions from waking life flow
together in dreams to be welded into a whole. There is then produced,
in the strictest sense, a confusion. For instance, a lady, who in the
course of the day has admired a fine baby and bought a big fish for
dinner, dreams with horror and surprise of finding a fully developed
baby in a large codfish. The confusion may be more remote, embodying
abstract ideas and without reference to recent impressions. Thus I
dreamed that my wife was expounding to me a theory by which the
substitution of slates for tiles in roofing had been accompanied by,
and intimately associated with, the growing diminution of crime in
England. Amid my wife's rather contemptuous opposition, I opposed this
theory, pointing out the picturesqueness of tiles, their cheapness,
greater comfort both in winter and summer, but at the same time it
occurred to me as a peculiar coincidence that tiles should have a
sanguinary tinge suggestive of criminal bloodthirstiness. I need
scarcely say that this bizarre theory had never suggested itself to my
waking thoughts. There was, however, a real connecting link in the
confusion--the redness--and it is a noteworthy point, of great
significance in the interpretation of dreams, that that link, although
clearly active from the first, remained subconscious until the end of
the dream, when it presented itself as an entirely novel coincidence.
The best simile for the mechanism of the most usual type of dream
phenomena is the magic lantern. Our dreams are like dissolving views
in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly or slowly, but
always uninterruptedly, so that, at any moment, two (often indeed
more) incongruous pictures are presented to consciousness which
strives to make one whole of them, and sometimes succeeds and is
sometimes baffled. Or we may say that the problem presented to
dreaming consciousness resembles that experiment in which
psychologists pronounce three wholly unconnected words, and require
the subject to combine them at once in a connected sentence. It is
unnecessary to add that such analogies fail to indicate the subtle
complexity of the apparatus which is at work in the manufacture of
dreams.
It is the presence of the strife I have just referred to between
apparently irreconcilable groups of images, in the effort of
overcoming the critical skepticism of sleeping consciousness--a feeble
skepticism, it may be, but, as many people do not seem to recognize,
a real skepticism--that the impressive emotional effects of dreams are
often displayed. It sometimes happens that two irreconcilable groups
of impressions reach sleeping consciousness, one flowing from a recent
stratum of memories, the other from an older stratum. A typical form
of this phenomenon often occurs in our dreams of dead friends.
Professor Sully remarks that in dreams of the dead "awareness of the
fact of death wholly disappears, or reduces itself to a vague feeling
of something delightfully wonderful in the restored presence." That,
however, as I have elsewhere shown,[1] is not the typical process in
dreaming of the dead; although in the later dreams of those who often
see their dead friends during sleep, the process is abbreviated, and
the friend's presence is accepted without a struggle--a very
interesting point, for it tends to show that in dreams, as in the
hypnotic state, the recollection of previous similar states of
consciousness persists, and the illusion is strengthened by
repetition.
In typical dreams of a dead friend there is a struggle between that
stream of recent memories which represents him as dead and that older
stream which represents him as living. These two streams are
inevitably caused by the fact of death, which sets up a barrier
between them and renders one set of memories incongruous with the
other set. In dreams we are not able to arrange our memories
chronologically, but we are perpetually reasoning and striving to be
logical. Consequently the two conflicting streams of memories break
against each other in restless conflict, and sleeping consciousness
endeavors to propound some theory which will reconcile them. The most
frequent theories are, as I have found, either that the news of the
friend's death was altogether false, or that he had been buried alive
by mistake, or else that having really died his soul has returned to
earth for a brief space. The mental and emotional conflict which such
dreams involve renders them very vivid. They make a profound
impression even after awakening, and for some sensitive persons are
too sacred to speak of. Even so cautious and skeptical a thinker as
Renan, when, after the death of his beloved sister Henriette, he
dreamed more than once that she had been buried alive, and that he
heard her voice calling to him from her grave, had to still his
horrible suspicions by the consideration that she had been tended by
experienced doctors. On less well-balanced minds, and more especially
in primitive stages of civilization, we can scarcely doubt that such
dreams, resting as they do on the foundation of consciousness, have
had a powerful influence in persuading man that death is but a
transient fact, and that the soul is independent of the body. I do not
wish to assert that they suffice to originate the belief.[2]
While dreams are thus often formed by the molding together of more or
less congruous images by a feeble but still intelligent sleeping
activity, another factor is to be found in the involuntary wavering
and perpetually mere meaningless change of dream imagery. Such
concentration as is possible during sleep always reveals a shifting,
oscillating, uncertain movement of the vision before us. We are, as it
were, reading a sign-post in the dusk, or making guesses at the names
of the stations as our express train flashes by the painted letters.
Any one who has ever been subject to the hypnagogic imagery sometimes
seen in the half-waking state, or who has ever taken mescal, knows
that it is absolutely impossible to fix an image. It is this factor in
dreams which causes them so often to baffle our analysis. In addition
to the mere, as it were, mechanical flowing together of images and
ideas, and the more or less intelligent molding of them into a whole,
there is thus a failure of sleeping attention to fix definitely the
final result--a failure which itself may evidently serve to carry on
the dream process by suggesting new images and combinations. I dreamed
once that I was with a doctor in his surgery, and saw in his hand a
note from a patient saying that doctors were fools and did him no
good, but he had lately taken some _selvdrolla_, recommended by a
friend, and it had done him more good than anything, so please send
him some more. I saw the note clearly, not, indeed, being conscious of
reading it word by word, but only of its meaning as I looked at it;
the one word I actually seemed to see, letter by letter, was the name
of the drug, and that changed and fluctuated beneath my vision as I
gazed at it, the final impression being _selvdrolla_. The doctor took
from a shelf a bottle containing a bright yellow oleaginous fluid, and
poured a little out, remarking that it had lately come into favor,
especially in uric-acid disorders, but was extremely expensive. I
expressed my surprise, having never before heard of it. Then, again to
my surprise, he poured rather copiously from the bottle on to a plate
of food, saying, in explanation, that it was pleasant to take and not
dangerous. This was a vivid morning dream, and on awakening I had no
difficulty in detecting the source of its various minor details,
especially a note received on the previous evening and containing a
dubious figure, the precise nature of which I had used my pocket lens
to determine. But what was _selvdrolla_, the most vivid element of the
dream? I sought vainly among my recent memories, and had almost
renounced the search when I recalled a large bottle of salad oil seen
on the supper table the previous evening; not, indeed, resembling the
dream bottle, but containing a precisely similar fluid. _Selvdrolla_
was evidently a corruption of "salad oil." I select this dream to
illustrate the uncertainty of dream consciousness, because it also
illustrates at the same time the element of certainty in dream
_subconsciousness_. Throughout my dream I remained, consciously, in
entire ignorance as to the real nature of _selvdrolla_, yet a latent
element in consciousness was all the time presenting it to me in
ever-clearer imagery.
While the confusions of dreaming are usually the union of unconnected
streams of imagery which have, as it were, come from widely remote
parts of the memory system to strike together at the narrow focus of
shaping consciousness, in some rarer cases the fused images are really
suggested by analogy and are not accidental. Maury records successions
of dream imagery strung together by verbal resemblances; I have found
such dreams rare, but other forms of association fairly common. Thus I
once dreamed that I was with a dentist who was about to extract a
tooth from a patient. Before applying the forceps he remarked to me
(at the same time setting fire to a perfumed cloth at the end of
something like a broomstick in order to dissipate the unpleasant odor)
that it was the largest tooth he had ever seen. When extracted I found
that it was indeed enormous, in the shape of a caldron, with walls an
inch thick. Taking from my pocket a tape measure (such as I always
carry in waking life) I founds the diameter to be not less than
twenty-five inches; the interior was like roughly hewn rock, and there
were sea-weeds and lichenlike growths within. The size of the tooth
seemed to me large, but not extraordinarily so. It is well known that
pain in the teeth, or the dentist's manipulations, cause those organs
to seem of extravagant extent; in dreams this tendency rules
unchecked; thus a friend once dreamed that mice were playing about in
a cavity in her tooth. But for the dream first quoted there was no
known dental origin; it arose solely or chiefly from a walk during the
previous afternoon among the rocks of the Cornish coast at low tide,
and the fantastic analogy, which had not occurred to waking
consciousness, suggested itself during sleep.
The following dream illustrates an association of quite a different
order: I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a house,
writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the emotions
naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her night dress appear
at a lofty window some distance off and throw herself down. I went on
writing, however, and found that in the course of my literary
employment--I am not clear as to its precise nature--the very next
thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as I had just
witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordinary
coincidence: it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Such dreams,
reduplicating the imagery in a new sensory medium, are fairly common,
with me at all events, though I can not easily explain them. The
association is not so much of analogy as of sensory media, in this
case the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases a
scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. It is
interesting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping
consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication.
It sometimes happens that the confused imagery of dreams includes
elements drawn from forgotten memories--that is to say, that sleeping
consciousness can draw on faint impressions of the past which waking
consciousness is unable to reach. This is a very important type of
dream because of its bearing on the explanation of certain dream
phenomena which we are sometimes asked to bow down before as
supernatural. I may illustrate what I mean by the following very
instructive case. I woke up recalling the chief items of a rather
vivid dream: I had imagined myself in a large old house, where the
furniture, though of good quality, was ancient, and the chairs
threatened to give way as one sat on them. The place belonged to one
Sir Peter Bryan, a hale old gentleman who was accompanied by his son
and grandson. There was a question of my buying the place from him,
and I was very complimentary to the old gentleman's appearance of
youthfulness, absurdly affecting not to know which was the grandfather
and which the grandson. On awaking I said to myself that here was a
purely imaginative dream, quite unsuggested by any definite
experiences. But when I began to recall the trifling incidents of the
previous day I realized that that was far from being the case. So far
from the dream having been a pure effort of imagination I found that
every minute item could be traced to some separate source. The name of
Sir Peter Bryan alone completely baffled me; I could not even recall
that I had at that time ever heard of any one called Bryan. I
abandoned the search and made my notes of the dream and its sources. I
had scarcely done so when I chanced to take up a volume of
biographies which I had glanced through carelessly the day before. I
found that it contained, among others, the lives of Lord
_Peter_borough and George _Bryan_ Brummel. I had certainly seen those
names the day before; yet before I took up the book once again it
would have been impossible for me to recall the exact name of Beau
Brummel, and I should have been inclined to say that I had never even
heard the name of Bryan. I repeat that I regard this as,
psychologically, a most instructive dream. It rarely happens (though I
could give one or two more examples from the experience of friends)
that we can so clearly and definitely demonstrate the presence of a
forgotten memory in a dream; in the case of old memories it is usually
impossible. It so happened that the forgotten memory which in this
case re-emerged to sleeping consciousness was a fact of no consequence
to myself or any one else. But if it had been the whereabouts of a
lost deed or a large sum of money, and I had been able to declare, as
in this case, that the impression received in my dream had never to my
knowledge existed in waking consciousness, and yet were to declare my
faith that the dream probably had a simple and natural explanation, on
every hand I should be sarcastically told that there is no credulity
to match the credulity of the skeptic.
The profound emotions of waking life, the questions and problems on
which we spread our chief voluntary mental energy, are not those which
usually present themselves at once to dream consciousness. It is, so
far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly the trifling, the
incidental, the "forgotten" impressions of daily life which reappear
in our dreams. The psychic activities that are awake most intensely
are those that sleep most profoundly. If we preserve the common image
of the "stream of consciousness," we might say that the grave facts of
life sink too deeply into the flood to reappear at once in the calm of
repose, while the mere light and buoyant trifles of life, flung
carelessly in during the day, at once rise to the surface, to dance
and mingle and evolve in ways that this familiar image of "the stream
of consciousness" will not further help us to picture.
So far I have been discussing only one of the great groups into which
dreams may be divided. Most investigators of dreams agree that there
are two such groups, the one having its basis in memories, the other
founded on actual physical sensations experienced at the moment of
dreaming and interpreted by sleeping consciousness. Various names have
been given to these two groups; Sully, for instance, terms them
central and peripheral. Perhaps the best names, however, are those
adopted by Miss Calkins, who calls the first group representative, the
second group presentative.
All writers on dreaming have brought forward presentative dreams, and
there can be no doubt that impressions received during sleep from any
of the external senses may serve as a basis for dreams. I need only
record one example to illustrate this main and most obvious group of
presentative dreams. I dreamed that I was listening to a performance
of Haydn's Creation, the chief orchestral part of the performance
seeming to consist chiefly of the very realistic representation of the
song of birds, though I could not identify the note of any particular
bird. Then followed solos by male singers, whom I saw, especially one
who attracted my attention by singing at the close in a scarcely
audible voice. On awakening the source of the dream was not
immediately obvious, but I soon realized that it was the song of a
canary in another room. I had never heard Haydn's Creation, except in
fragments, nor thought of it at any recent period; its reputation as
regards the realistic representation of natural sounds had evidently
caused it to be put forward by sleeping consciousness as a plausible
explanation of the sounds heard, and the visual centers had accepted
the theory.
It is a familiar fact that internal sensations also form a frequent
basis of dreams. All the internal organs, when disturbed or distended
or excited, may induce dreams, and especially that aggravated kind of
dreaming which we call nightmare. This fact is so well known that such
dreams are usually dismissed without further analysis. It is a
mistake, however, so to dismiss them, for it seems probable that it is
precisely here that we may find the most instructive field of dream
psychology. On account of the profoundly emotional effect of such
dreams they are very interesting to study, but this very element of
emotion renders them somewhat obscure objects of study. I do not
venture to offer with absolute certainty one or two novel suggestions
which dream experiences have led me to regard as probable.
Dreams of flying have so often been recorded--from the time of St.
Jerome, who mentions that he was subject to them--that they may fairly
be considered to constitute one of the commonest forms of dreaming.
All my life, it seems to me, I have at intervals had such dreams in
which I imagined myself rhythmically bounding into the air and
supported on the air. These dreams, in my case at all events, are not
generally remembered immediately on awakening (seeming to indicate
that they depend on a cause which does not usually come into action at
the end of sleep), but they leave behind them a vague but profound
sense of belief in their reality and reasonableness.[3] Several
writers have attempted to explain this familiar phenomenon. Gowers
considers that a spontaneous contraction of the stapedius muscle of
the ear during sleep causes a sensation of falling. Stanley Hall, who
has himself from childhood had dreams of flying, boldly argues that we
have here "some faint reminiscent atavistic echo from the primeval
sea"; and that such dreams are really survivals--psychic vestigial
remains--taking us back to the far past, in which man's ancestors
needed no feet to swim or float. Such a theory may accord with the
profound conviction of reality that accompanies such dreams, though
this may be more simply accounted for, even by mere repetition, as
with dreams of the dead; but it is rather a hazardous theory, and it
seems to me infinitely more probable that such dreams are a
misinterpretation of actual internal sensations.
My own explanation was immediately suggested by the following dream. I
dreamed that I was watching a girl acrobat, in appropriate costume,
who was rhythmically rising to a great height in the air and then
falling, without touching the floor, though each time she approached
quite close to it. At last she ceased, exhausted and perspiring, and
had to be led away. Her movements were not controlled by mechanism,
and apparently I did not regard mechanism as necessary. It was a vivid
dream, and I awoke with a distinct sensation of oppression in the
chest. In trying to account for this dream, which was not founded on
any memory, it occurred to me that probably I had here the key to a
great group of dreams. The rhythmic rising and falling of the acrobat
was simply the objectivation of the rhythmic rising and falling of my
own respiratory muscles under the influence of some slight and unknown
physical oppression, and this oppression was further translated into a
condition of perspiring exhaustion in the girl, just as it is recorded
that a man with heart disease dreamed habitually of sweating and
panting horses climbing up hill. We may recall also the curious
sensation as of the body being transformed into a vast bellows which
is often the last sensation felt before the unconsciousness produced
by nitrous oxide gas. When we are lying down there is a real rhythmic
rising and falling of the chest and abdomen, centering in the
diaphragm, a series of oscillations which at both extremes are only
limited by the air. Moreover, in this position we have to recognize
that the whole internal organism--the circulatory, nervous, and other
systems--are differently balanced from what they are in the upright
position, and that a disturbance of internal equilibrium
always accompanies falling. Further, it is possible that the
misinterpretation is confirmed to sleeping consciousness by sensations
from without, by the absence of the tactile pressure produced by
boots on the foot, or the contact of the ground with the soles; we are
at once conscious of movement and conscious that the soles of the feet
are in contact only with the air. Thus in normal sleep the conditions
may be said to be always favorable for producing dreams of flying or
of floating in the air, and any slight thoracic disturbance, even in
healthy persons, arising from lungs, heart, or stomach, and serving to
bring these conditions to sleeping consciousness, may determine such a
dream.
There is another common class of dreams which, it seems fairly evident
to me, must also find their psychological explanation chiefly in the
visceral sensations--I mean dreams of murder. Many psychologists have
referred with profound concern to the facility and prevalence of
murder in dreams, sometimes as a proof of the innate wickedness of
human nature made manifest in the unconstraint of sleep, sometimes as
evidence of an atavistic return to the modes of feeling of our
ancestors, the thin veneer of civilization being removed during sleep.
Maudsley and Mme. de Manacéïne, for example, find evidence in such
dreams of a return to primitive modes of feeling. It may well be that
there is some element of truth in this view, but even if so we still
have to account for the production of such dreams. For this we must,
in part at least, fall back upon the logical outcome of dream
confusions, owing to which, for instance, a lady who has carved a duck
at dinner may a few hours later wake up exhausted by the imaginary
effort of cutting off her husband's head. But I think we may find
evidence that the dream of murder is often a falsely logical deduction
from abnormal visceral and especially digestive sensations.
I may illustrate such dreams by the following example: A lady dreamed
that her husband called her aside and said: "Now, do not scream or
make a fuss; I am going to tell you something. I have to kill a man.
It is necessary, to put him out of his agony." He then took her into
his study and showed her a young man lying on the floor with a wound
in his breast, and covered with blood. "But how will you do it?" she
asked. "Never mind," he replied, "leave that to me." He took something
up and leaned over the man. She turned aside and heard a horrible
gurgling sound. Then all was over. "Now," he said, "we must get rid of
the body. I want you to send for So-and-so's cart, and tell him I wish
to drive it." The cart came. "You must help me to make the body into a
parcel," he said to his wife; "give me plenty of brown paper." They
made it into a parcel, and with terrible difficulty and effort the
wife assisted her husband to get the body down stairs and lift it into
the cart. At every stage, however, she presented to him the
difficulties of the situation. But he carelessly answered all
objections, said he would take the body up to the moor, among the
stones, remove the brown paper, and people would think the murdered
man had killed himself. He drove off and soon returned with the empty
cart. "What's this blood in my cart?" asked the man to whom it
belonged, looking inside. "Oh, that's only paint," replied the
husband. But the dreamer had all along been full of apprehension lest
the deed should be discovered, and the last thing she could recall,
before waking in terror, was looking out of the window at a large
crowd which surrounded the house with shouts of "Murder!" and threats.
This tragedy, with its almost Elizabethan air, was built up out of a
few commonplace impressions received during the previous day, none of
which impressions contained any suggestion of murder. The tragic
element appears to have been altogether due to the psychic influences
of indigestion arising from a supper of pheasant. To account for our
oppression during sleep, sleeping consciousness assumes moral causes
which alone appear to it of sufficient gravity to be the adequate
cause of the immense emotions we are experiencing. Even in our waking
and fully conscious states we are inclined to give the preference to
moral over physical causes, quite irrespective of the justice of our
preferences; in our sleeping states this tendency is exaggerated, and
the reign of purely moral causes is not disturbed by even a suggestion
of mere physical causation.
There is certainly no profounder emotional excitement during sleep
than that which arises from a disturbed or distended stomach, and is
reflected by the pneumogastric to the accelerated heart and the
impeded respiration.[4] We are thereby thrown into a state of
uninhibited emotional agitation, a state of agony and terror such as
we rarely or never attain during waking life. Sleeping consciousness,
blindfolded and blundering, a prey to these massive waves from below,
and fumbling about desperately for some explanation, jumps at the idea
that only the attempt to escape some terrible danger or the guilty
consciousness of some awful crime can account for this immense
emotional uproar. Thus the dream is suffused by a conviction which the
continued emotion serves to support. We do not--it seems most simple
and reasonable to conclude--experience terror because we think we have
committed a crime, but we think we have committed a crime because we
experience terror. And the fact that in such dreams we are far more
concerned with escape from the results of crime than with any agony of
remorse is not, as some have thought, due to our innate indifference
to crime, but simply to the fact that our emotional state suggests to
us active escape from danger rather than the more passive grief of
remorse. Thus our dreams bear witness to the fact that our
intelligence is often but a tool in the hands of our emotions.[5]
I have had frequent occasion to refer to the objectivation of
subjective sensations as a phenomenon of dreaming. It is, indeed, so
frequent and so important a phenomenon that it needs some further
reference. In hysteria (which by some of the most recent authorities,
like Sollier, is regarded as a species of somnambulism), in
"demon-possession," and many other abnormal phenomena it is well known
that there is, as it were, a doubling of personality; the _ego_ is
split up into two or more parts, each of which may act as a separate
personality. The literature of morbid psychology is full of
extraordinary and varied cases exhibiting this splitting up of
personality. But it is usually forgotten that in dreams the doubling
of personality is a normal and constant phenomenon in all healthy
people. In dreaming we can divide our body between ourselves and
another person. Thus a medical friend dreamed that in conversation
with a lady patient he found his hand resting on her knee and was
unable to remove it; awakening in horror from this unprofessional
situation he found his own hand firmly clasped between his knees; the
hand had remained his own, the knee had become another person's, the
hand being claimed, rather than the knee, on account of its greater
tactile sensibility. Again, we sometimes objectify our own physical
discomforts felt during sleep in the emotions of some other person, or
even in some external situations. And, possibly, every dream in which
there is any dramatic element is an instance of the same splitting up
of personality; in our dreams we may experience shame or confusion
from the rebuke or the arguments of other persons, but the persons who
administer the rebuke or apply the argument are still ourselves.
When we consider that this dream process, with its perpetual
dramatization of our own personality, has been going on as long as man
has been man--and probably much longer, for it is evident that animals
dream--it is impossible to overestimate its immense influence on human
belief. Men's primitive conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of
the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional
phenomena, have certainly been influenced by this constant dream
experience. It is the universal primitive explanation of abnormal
psychic and even physical phenomena that some other person or spirit
is working within the subject of the abnormal experience. Certainly
dreaming is not the sole source of such conceptions, but they could
scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could not ever have
arisen, among races who were wholly devoid of dream experiences. A
large part of all progress in psychological knowledge, and, indeed, a
large part of civilization itself, lies in realizing that the
apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons
and geniuses of all sorts that seemed at first to take possession of
the feeble and vacant individuality are themselves but modes of action
of marvelously rich and varied personalities. But in our dreams we are
brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and
shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of
our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.
There is one other general characteristic of dreams that is worth
noting, because its significance is not usually recognized. In dreams
we are always reasoning. It is sometimes imagined that reason is in
abeyance during sleep. So far from this being the case, we may almost
be said to reason much more during sleep than when we are awake. That
our reasoning is bad, even preposterous, that it constantly ignores
the most elementary facts of waking life, scarcely affects the
question. All dreaming is a process of reasoning. That artful
confusion of ideas and images which at the outset I referred to as the
most constant feature of dream mechanism is nothing but a process of
reasoning, a perpetual effort to argue out harmoniously the absurdly
limited and incongruous data present to sleeping consciousness. Binet,
grounding his conclusions on hypnotic experiments, has very justly
determined that reasoning is the fundamental part of all thinking, the
very texture of thought. It is founded on perception itself, which
already contains all the elements of the ancient syllogism. For in all
perception, as he shows, there is a succession of three images, of
which the first fuses with the second, which in its turn suggests the
third. Now this establishment of new associations, this construction
of images, which, as we may easily convince ourselves, is precisely
what takes place in dreaming, is reasoning itself.
Reasoning is a synthesis of images suggested by resemblance and
contiguity, indeed a sort of logical vision, more intense even than
actual vision, since it produces hallucinations. To reasoning all
forms of mental activity may finally be reduced; mind, as Wundt has
said, is a thing that reasons. When we apply these general statements
to dreaming, we may see that the whole phenomenon of dreaming is
really the same process of image-formation, based on resemblance and
contiguity, which is at the basis of reasoning. Every dream is the
outcome of this strenuous, wide-ranging instinct to reason. The
supposed "imaginative faculty," regarded as so highly active during
sleep, is simply the inevitable play of this automatic logic. The
characteristic of the reasoning of dreams is that it is unusually bad,
and this badness is due chiefly to the absence of memory elements that
would be present to waking consciousness, and to the absence of
sensory elements to check the false reasoning which without them
appears to us conclusive. That is to say--to fall back on the
excellent generalization which Parish has elaborately applied to all
forms of hallucination--there is a process of dissociation by which
ordinary channels of association are temporarily blocked and the
conditions prepared for the formation of the hallucination. It is, as
Parish has argued, in sleep and in those sleep-resembling states
called hypnagogic that a condition of dissociation leading to
hallucination is most apt to occur.
The following dream illustrates the part played by dissociation: A
lady dreamed that an acquaintance wished to send a small sum of money
to a person in Ireland. She rashly offered to take it over to Ireland.
On arriving home she began to repent of her promise, as the weather
was extremely wild and cold. She began, however, to make preparations
for dressing warmly, and went to consult an Irish friend, who said she
would have to be floated over to Ireland tightly jammed in a crab
basket. On returning home she fully discussed the matter with her
husband, who thought it would be folly to undertake such a journey,
and she finally relinquished it, with great relief. In this dream--the
elements of which could all be accounted for--the association between
sending money and postal orders which would at once occur to waking
consciousness was closed; consciousness was a prey to such suggestions
as reached it, but on the basis of these suggestions it reasoned and
concluded quite sagaciously. The phenomena of dreaming furnish a
delightful illustration of the fact that reasoning, in its rough form,
is only the crudest and most elementary form of intellectual
operation, and that the finer forms of thinking only become possible
when we hold in check this tendency to reason. "All the thinking in
the world," as Goethe puts it, "will not lead us to thought."
It is in such characteristics as these--at once primitive, childlike,
and insane--that we may find the charm of dreaming. In our sleeping
emotional life we are much more like ourselves than we are in our
sleeping intellectual life. It is a mistake to imagine that our moral
and æsthetic instincts are abolished in dreams; they are often
weakened, but by no means abolished. Such a result is natural when we
remember that our emotions and instincts are both more primitive and
less under the dominion of the external senses than are our ideas. Yet
in both respects we are removed a stage backward in our dreams.
The emotional intensity, the absurd logic, the tendency to
personification--nearly all the points I have referred to as
characterizing our dreams--are the characteristics of the child, the
savage, and the madman. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is
suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were, in the
arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature,
and in his dreams a man will listen to the arguments of his dog with
as little surprise as Balaam heard the reproaches of his ass. The
unexpected limitations of our dream world, the exclusion of so many
elements which are present even unconsciously in waking life, imparts
a splendid freedom and ease to the intellectual operations of the
sleeping mind, and an extravagant romance, a poignant tragedy, to our
emotions. "He has never known happiness," said Lamb, speaking out of
his own experience, "who has never been mad." And there are many who
taste in dreams a happiness they never know when awake. In the waking
moments of our complex civilized life we are ever in a state of
suspense which makes all great conclusions impossible; the
multiplicity of the facts of life, always present to consciousness,
restrains the free play of logic (except for that happy dreamer, the
mathematician) and surrounds most of our pains and nearly all our
pleasures with infinite qualifications; we are tied down to a sober
tameness. In our dreams the fetters of civilization are loosened, and
we know the fearful joy of freedom.
At the same time it is these characteristics which make dreams a fit
subject of serious study. It was not until the present century that
the psychological importance of the study of insanity was recognized.
So recent is the study of savage mind that the workers who have laid
its foundation are yet all living. The systematic investigation of
children only began yesterday. To-day our dreams begin to seem to us
an allied subject of study, inasmuch as they reveal within ourselves a
means of entering sympathetically into ideas and emotional attitudes
belonging to narrow or ill-adjusted states of consciousness which
otherwise we are now unable to experience. And they have this further
value, that they show us how many abnormal phenomena--possession,
double consciousness, unconscious memory, and so forth--which have
often led the ignorant and unwary to many strange conclusions, really
have a simple explanation in the healthy normal experience of all of
us during sleep. Here, also, it is true that we ourselves and our
beliefs are to some extent "such stuff as dreams are made of."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] On Dreaming of the Dead. Psychological Review, September, 1895. In
this paper I reported several cases showing the nature and evolution
of dreams concerning dead friends. I have since received evidence from
various friends and correspondents, scientific and unscientific, of
both sexes, confirming my belief in a frequency of this type of dream.
Professor Binet (L'Année Psychologique, 1896) has also furnished a
case in support of my view, and is seeking for further evidence.
[2] In Japan stories of the returning of the dead are very common.
Lafcadio Hearn gives one as told by a Japanese which closely resembles
the type of dream I am discussing. "A lover resolves to commit suicide
on the grave of his sweetheart. He found her tomb and knelt before it
and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to
do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him 'Anata!' and felt her
hand upon his hand; and he turned and saw her kneeling beside him,
smiling and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then
his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the
doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said: 'Do not doubt; it is
really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried because my
parents thought me dead--buried too soon. Yet you see I am not dead,
not a ghost. It is I; do not doubt it!'"
[3] Many saints (Saint Ida, of Louvain, for example) claimed the power
of rising into the air, and one asks one's self whether this faith may
not be based on dream experiences mistranslated by a disordered brain.
M. Raffaelli, the eminent French painter, who is subject to these
sleeping experiences of floating on the air, confesses that they are
so convincing that he has jumped out of bed on awaking and attempted
to repeat the experience. "I need not tell you," he adds, "that I have
never been able to succeed."
[4] Other pains and discomforts--toothache, for instance--may,
however, give rise to dreams of murder.
[5] It may be added that they also present evidence--to which
attention has not, I believe, been previously called--in support of
the James-Lange or physiological theory of emotion, according to which
the element of bodily change in emotion is the cause and not the
result of the emotion.
* * * * *
The harmonious and equitable evolution of man, says President
Dabney, of the University of Tennessee, "does not mean that every
man must be educated just like his fellow. The harmony is within
each individual. That community is most highly educated in which
each individual has attained the maximum of his possibilities in
the direction of his peculiar talents and opportunities."
THE BEST METHODS OF TAXATION.
BY THE LATE HON. DAVID A. WELLS.
PART I.
This historical survey of tax experience among peoples widely
differing in their economic condition and social relations, and this
examination of the scope and practice of taxation, with especial
reference to the tax systems of the United States as defined and
interpreted by judicial authority, prepare the way for a discussion of
the best methods of taxation for a country situated as is the United
States. General as are the theoretical principles underlying taxation,
the application of these principles to existing conditions must be
modified to meet the long usage and inherited prejudice of the people,
and the form of production or manner of distributing wealth. This
holds true in the face of appearances so opposed to it as to defy
definition and acceptance. No less promising field for an income tax
can be pictured than British India, and few more promising fields than
France. Yet India has borne such a tax for years, while France will
not permit a true tax on income to be adopted as a part of its revenue
system. In the latter country the plea is made that the upper and
middle classes already pay under other forms of taxation more than
their due proportion of the public burdens, and an additional and
necessarily discriminating duty laid upon them will only make this
inequality the greater. Class interest may thus oppose its veto to a
change that promises to reduce the burdens of one class of taxpayers
at the expense of another; or may even oppose a change that offers the
chance of collecting a larger revenue with less real difficulty and
sacrifice on the part of the taxed. No opposition can set aside even
temporarily the great rules that clearly define a tax from tribute, a
legal and beneficial taking by the state of a certain part of the
public wealth from a demand that involves waste or mischievous
expenditure, for which the state or people derive no advantage
commensurate with the cost, or from which individuals obtain a gain
not defensible in justice, and at the expense of only one part of the
community.
After so many centuries of experiment, in which hardly a possible
source of state revenue has escaped attention, some knowledge of the
great principles of taxation might have been evolved. Unfortunately,
the experience of one nation is not accepted as containing lessons
applicable to the needs or conditions of another, and one generation
rarely appeals to history save to defend its own experiments.
Ignorance, half knowledge, which is quite as dangerous, and interest
guide or influence legislation, and those who predict failure or
danger are regarded as theorists, and denounced as unpractical.
Nowhere is the tendency to move independent of enlightened knowledge
more evident than in the United States. At every appearance of the tax
question, State and national legislatures are overwhelmed with
measures that have been tried in the past, and after a thorough test
condemned beyond any hope of defense.
Yet history shows the gradual disappearance of certain forms of
taxation which enjoyed great popularity for a time, and accomplished
the end of their creation in a crude and often cruel manner. Looking
over long periods of time, it is seen that some advances have been
made, rather from a change in the economic condition of the people
than from a true appreciation of the principles in question. The
development of popular liberty has been an essential factor, and the
alterations in tax methods require a close analysis of the causes
leading to the rise and dominance of political and constitutional
principle. While it is true that a popular uprising against fiscal
exactions usually marked the limit of endurance of an oppressive
system, it is also true that the same uprisings marked the completion
of one stage of political development, and the readiness or even the
need of entering upon a new stage. In one sense the progress of a
people toward civilization in its highest meaning may be illustrated
by its fiscal machinery and methods of obtaining its revenue from the
people. It will be of interest to glance at some of these passing
phases which have generally come down to a late day, and are still to
be found in activity in some of the most advanced states of Europe.
The practice of farming out the revenues of a state or any part of it
has become nearly obsolete, and where it does exist is the mark of a
fiscal machinery as yet not fully developed. The opportunities and
temptation which the contract system offered for oppressing the
taxpayers were apparent long before the state was in a position to
assert its ability to make its own collections. In France the
_fermiers généraux_ were a political factor, standing between the king
and his people, regarded as necessary to the former and as oppressors
of the latter. Their unpopularity, in part justified by their conduct,
was a not unimportant item in the arraignment of royalty by the
people. Wherever introduced, the farming of taxes proved in the long
run as unwise politically as it was unprofitable financially; and the
only reasonable defense for adopting it was the want of strength in
the state to command its own revenue--a want as likely to arise from
the dishonesty of its agents as from a political weakness. In early
times the most universal manner of supplying the treasury of the
state, the farming of taxes has become so rare as to be classed as a
curiosity. Italy still employs this machinery to collect her taxes on
tobacco, and Spain from necessity has mortgaged her taxes to the
bank, with the task of collecting them.
Of the same general character are the state lotteries, of which some
few and quite important instances may still be found in action. Of the
immorality of these instruments there can be little doubt, and there
is quite as unanimous an opinion as to their inefficiency as fiscal
instruments. Yet it is only within very recent years that state
lotteries have been discarded even in the most advanced countries. The
machinery of lotteries has often been modified, but, no matter how
altered in details, they all have appealed to the love of games of
chance. Adam Smith asserted that the "absurd presumption" of men in
their own good fortune is even more universal than the overweening
conceit which the greater part of men have in their own abilities.[6]
Yet another assertion of the same writer is as true: "The world
neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery, or one
in which the whole gain compensated the whole loss." Where the state
undertakes it, there is a profit generally assured to the state, but
that profit is by no means certain, and can not make good the
demoralization introduced among the people. State lotteries are still
a part of the revenue system in Italy and Austria (proper), where the
receipts are important, but show a decided tendency to diminish;
Hungary and Denmark, where they are of little moment; and in Spain,
where they are retained because of the general incapacity of the
administration to reach other and more profitable sources of revenue.
The experience of the State of Louisiana in connection with a State
lottery is too recent to require examination. It is not probable that
once abandoned such an instrument for obtaining money from the people
will be revived, save as a last resort.
The state monopoly in the manufacture and sale of an article for
fiscal purposes holds a place in European countries of high
importance, and is met elsewhere under conditions not so favorable to
its maintenance. As an example of the latter may be cited the colonial
policy of the Dutch in their possessions in the East. After the
termination of the trading companies, the Government undertook the
entire control of the colonies, and sought to make them a source of
revenue. The natives were to be taxed, but, having little of their own
to be taxed, and practicing no occupation that could of its own
volition become a profitable source of revenue, the state undertook to
organize industry, and, by creating an opportunity for employing the
labor of the natives, to receive the profits of production for its own
uses. The native chiefs were made "masters of industry" and collectors
of the revenue; and a certain part of the labor of the natives, one
day in every five, was decreed to the state. In order to derive a
profit, this labor must be bestowed in cultivating some product as
find a market in international trade. Hence arose the importance of
the sugar, coffee, tobacco, and spice crops of these Dutch islands,
and for many years a handsome profit to the treasury was obtained from
the management and sales of product. With the great fall in prices of
sugar and coffee throughout the world, and the narrowing of the market
for cane sugar, the Government obtained a less income each year, and
has found it of advantage to relax the conditions surrounding
cultivation, and to throw the management of the plantations more and
more into private hands. To such an extent has this transition been
effected that the state can no longer be considered as controlling a
monopoly in product or sales, and is content with a revenue from other
sources, one that does not even cover the expenses incurred in the
colonial system. This experiment differs widely from those industries
undertaken with the aid or encouragement of the state to be found in
India. It was not with a fiscal object that they were established, and
not infrequently the state sacrifices revenue by releasing them from
tax burdens they would ordinarily endure. As one of the few remaining
instances of the direct participation of a state in the production of
products intended for foreign markets, yet undertaken and maintained
for fiscal reasons, the history of the Dutch colonies in the East is
instructive.
In Prussia the working of certain mines is in the hands of the state,
and was originally looked upon as an important contribution to the
income of the state. As in the Dutch experience, the changes in
production throughout the world have greatly reduced the returns and
made the income variable; yet there is little disposition to dispose
of these possessions. "The danger of mineral supplies being worked in
a reckless and extravagant manner without regard to the welfare of
future generations, and the dread of combinations by the producers of
such commodities as tin, copper, and salt, with the aim of raising
prices, have both tended to hinder the alienation of state mines."[7]
The more common form of state monopoly is that which occupies a middle
position, established for reasons of public safety or utility as well
as of revenue. The salt monopoly enforced in Prussia was only
abolished in 1867, and is still maintained in every canton of
Switzerland. The strongest plea in its defense has been the guarantee
by the state of the purity of the article sold, and this phase of the
question has superseded the revenue aspect. Few articles of prime
necessity, like salt, are subject to monopolies imposed by the state,
and by a process of elimination it is only articles of luxury or
voluntary consumption that are regarded as fit objects of monopoly for
the benefit of the state.
A tax imposed upon an article at a certain stage of its production or
manufacture may enforce the expediency or necessity of a state
monopoly. Where the supervision of the state agents must be so close
as to interfere with the conduct of the industry, the state intervenes
and itself controls the manufacture and sale. Tobacco has long been
subject to this fiscal _régime_, and, proving so productive of
revenue, there is little to be said against a monopoly by the state of
its manufacture and sale.
In Italy the tobacco monopoly is conceded to a company, but its return
of net revenue to the state is nearly as large as the revenue derived
from the taxes on real property (about thirty-eight million dollars a
year). Prussia imposes a charge on the home-grown tobacco by a tax on
the land devoted to its culture, but the return is very small, and
Bismarck wished to introduce a true tobacco monopoly, modeled on that
of France. But the conditions were opposed to his scheme, for the use
of tobacco is general throughout the empire, and a proposition to
increase its price by taxation or modify its free manufacture and
distribution excited a widespread opposition. France maintains a full
monopoly, and finds it too profitable to be lightly set aside unless
some equally profitable source of revenue is discovered to make good
the loss its abolition would involve.
While historical support is given to the maintenance of a monopoly as
in France, it is not probable that the system will find imitators in
other states, however tempting the returns obtained might seem. Great
Britain has by her insular position solved the problem in another way.
By interdicting the domestic cultivation of tobacco, all that is
consumed must be imported, and a customs duty offers a ready
instrument for making the plant, in whatever form it enters,
contribute its dues to the exchequer. In Russia, as in the United
States, where tobacco is a domestic product, the tax is imposed upon
its manufacture, and this method requires supervision but no monopoly
of the state.
The tobacco _régime_ is defended almost entirely on fiscal grounds,
and as a monopoly, an extreme measure, has proved its value as an
instrument of taxation. Other reasons, of a moral character, are urged
to induce the state to monopolize the manufacture and sale of
distilled spirits. Both France and Germany have considered this
question, and, in spite of confident predictions of a large profit,
have decided not to undertake it. Russia, on the other hand, has taken
it up quite as much on social as on revenue grounds, and is gradually
securing a monopoly of the trade in spirits. The initial cost of the
undertaking is large, and, as the system has not yet been perfected,
it is too early to give a judgment on its availability as a financial
instrument.
The transit dues, once commonly used by different countries, have been
generally abandoned, and in China must they be sought for in their
original forms of vexatious and unprofitable force. They arose from a
desire to derive some benefit from a commerce permitted grudgingly,
and rarely attaining any high results. The same end was sought by
duties on exports, much employed when the country was supposed to be
drained of its wealth by what was sent out of it. The conditions
necessary for a successful duty on exports are not often found, and
only in a few countries are they now existent. In Italy, South
America, and Asia, exports of certain natural products are taxed, and,
as in the case of Brazil, yield a notable revenue. In view of the
rapid advancement of production in new countries and of inventions in
the old, whereby many natural monopolies have been destroyed and
competition made more general, such duties prove to be more
obstructive to trade than productive of revenue, and are rapidly being
abandoned. In spite of a formal prohibition of export duties in the
Constitution of the United States, they are sometimes suggested in all
seriousness.
In thus clearing the path of what may be called dead or dying methods
of recent tax systems, the advantages enjoyed by the United States in
their freedom from such survivals become more evident. The practice of
farming taxes never gained a foothold in any part of the country.
Lotteries have been occasional, and with two exceptions have been
conducted on a limited scale--that of Louisiana is well known; an
earlier instance is less known. During the Revolution one of the means
resorted to by the Continental Congress for income was a lottery, but
the attempt proved disastrous to all concerned, and was finally
abandoned even more thoroughly than was the continental currency.
State monopolies of production and sale of any commodity have never
met with favor, and stand condemned in the desire for individual
initiative. As sources of revenue, the public lands, state control of
the post office, and of such municipal undertakings as the water and,
in a very few cases, the gas supply, has been employed, and in place
of profit the mere cost of management is sought. More than any country
of continental Europe, the United States has depended upon taxes, pure
and simple, unsupported or modified by state domains, state mines,
state manufactures, or state monopolies. Even Great Britain in her
local taxation is bound and hampered by precedent, and pursues a
system that is notoriously confused, costly, and vexatious. Long usage
and the erection of independent and conflicting authorities on
principles other than fiscal have imposed upon the local agents the
duty of assessing and collecting county and borough taxes which are as
indefensible in theory as they are difficult in practice.
From this weight of tradition and precedent the United States has been
almost entirely free, and it was possible to construct out of small
beginnings systems of Federal and State taxation at least reasonable
and consistent, producing an increasing revenue with the rapid
development of wealth and the larger number of taxable objects; and so
elastic as to adapt themselves to such changes as are inevitable in
any progressive movement of commerce or industry. That no such system
has resulted after a century of national life, and an even longer term
of local (colonial and State) activities, these papers have tended to
show. That the time is at hand when the problem of a thorough reform
of both State and Federal taxation must be met, current facts prove
beyond any doubt. If I have aided in a proper comprehension of these
problems, and, by collecting certain experiences in taxation among
other peoples and in different stages of civilization, contributed
toward a proper solution, the end of this work will have been
attained. It is not possible to introduce a complete change of policy
at once; it is not only feasible but necessary to indicate the
direction this change should take, and the ends to be secured in
making them. And first as to Federal taxation:
In a democracy like that of the United States, the continuance of a
mixed system of direct and indirect taxes is a foregone conclusion.
Not that there is an absence of change or modification in the details
of this double system, or in the application or distribution of a
particular impost or duty. To deny such modification is to deny any
movement in the body politic, or any progress in the industrial and
commercial economy of the people. There is a steady and continuous
movement in every direction, and the mere effort to escape taxation
results in a new adjustment of related facts. This development has,
partly through necessity and partly through a rising consciousness of
what a tax implies, been tending from indirect to direct taxes. Ever
restive under a rigid supervision by the state of private concerns,
there has been a wholesome opposition to inquisitorial taxes. But this
opposition has been carried too far, and is due more to the ignorant
and at times brutal disregard by the agents selected for enforcing the
law than to an appreciation of the injustice of the tax. Whether in
customs or excise, the same blunders of management have been
committed, and created a spirit in the people that is injurious to
their best interests. On the one hand, private enterprises have been
unduly favored by the removal of foreign competition, a favor that is
now disappearing through the remarkable development of domestic
competition. Thus taxes have been extensively used for other purposes
than to obtain revenue, and for private ends. On the other hand, there
has been created the feeling that taxation is a proper instrument for
effecting a more equal distribution of wealth among the people, and
readily becomes an instrument of oppression.
The almost absolute dependence of the Federal Government upon the
customs duties for revenue through a great part of its existence was a
striking fact. The simplicity of collection and the comparatively
moderate scale of duties, although considered high at the time of
imposition, gave this branch of the possible sources of revenue a
magnified importance. The development of the country was slow, and at
times greatly hampered by the tariff policy; but until about 1857 no
other source of income was needed to meet the expenditures of the
Government in a time of peace.
In recent years this has all changed, and not for the better. The
immense development in manufactures and financial ability accomplished
since 1860 has made a tariff for protection an anachronism. The
political features of customs legislation have been pushed so far as
almost to overshadow the fiscal qualities. The wave of protectionism
that followed the abrogation of the commercial treaties of Europe
about 1880 has resulted in tariffs framed with the desire to injure
the commerce of other states rather than to meet the needs of a
treasury. In the United States this policy has been carried beyond
that of Europe, and the tariff now in existence is more protective
than any hitherto enforced, short of absolute prohibition of imports.
In more respects than one the tariff law of 1897 was an extreme
application of the protective policy. Each year the United States has
demonstrated its ability not only to meet the industrial competition
of the world on an equal footing, but to engage with it aggressively
and with complete success. It is not necessary to give the figures of
exports of manufactures to establish this fact; it is now beyond
question. To frame a measure of extreme protection was, therefore, to
overlook the most striking phase of the industrial situation existing
in the United States. With an ability to manufacture cheaply and on a
grand scale, and with a capacity to supply the demands of a market
larger than any home market, there was no foreign competition to
encounter, and the higher rates of duties meant nothing, either for
protection or for revenue. In carrying further into action a tariff
framed more for protection than for revenue, a twofold error was
committed. The provisions were so complicated as to make the
application difficult, and in applying these provisions inquisitorial
and vexatious regulations were necessary to assure even a reasonable
fulfillment of the requirements. In former tariff laws a general
description carried a large class of articles, and a uniform duty,
usually _ad valorem_, was collected. But under the demand for a more
scientific tariff, these general classes were broken up into a number
of enumerated articles, each one carrying a specific or mixed duty,
and an omnium or basket clause at the end to catch any article that
could not be included in any enumeration. This desire to fix specific
rates upon each imported commodity has been applied more generally in
the law of 1897 than in any previous tariff act. An examination of the
imports of manufactures of textile fibers will illustrate this
increase of complexity without any increase of revenue. Indeed, these
classifications and rates, being suggested by interested parties, have
for their object a reduction of imports, and as a rule a reduction in
revenue from them follows.
The second objection to the increasing complexity of the tariff laws
is to be found in the petty annoyances imposed upon importers and
others in enforcing the not always consistent provisions of the law.
These vexations are made all the more telling by the fact that the
administration of the law is apt to be in the hands of those who are
openly hostile to foreign importations, and therefore regard the
importer in an unfriendly spirit. The power given to the customs
agents is enormous, and it is not remarkable that it is abused. The
demand for samples, the appraisement of articles, the classification
of new or compound commodities, all offer room for controversy, which
is not always decided by an appeal to the courts of justice. In
special instances, where a section of the law has been framed in
behalf of a special interest, the attempt to enforce it becomes petty
tyranny of the most intolerable kind.
In operation the law soon exhibited its failure as a revenue measure.
Although duties were generally increased, the more important articles
taxed yielded a smaller revenue than under lower rates. The aggregate
collections under the bill did not meet the expectations of its
sponsors, and for two reasons: first, because the higher duties
discouraged imports; and secondly, the demand for imported articles
was steadily decreasing under the expanding ability of home
manufactures to meet the needs of the market. No measure short of a
direct encouragement to importations can change this situation, or
prevent the further shrinkage in the use of foreign manufactures. It
follows that the tariff, unless radically altered, can no longer be
depended on for a return sufficient to defray one half of the rapidly
increasing expenditures of the national Government. By refusing to
impose moderate duties on articles of general consumption, revenue is
sacrificed; by insisting upon imposing protective duties where little
revenue can be had, the tariff is converted into a political weapon.
Its dangerous qualities are strengthened by turning these duties
against the products of certain countries, a policy specially fit to
invite reprisals.
Even the framers of this latest tariff entertained the belief that
some provision should be made for breaking its full effect. The
familiar scheme for reciprocity treaties, under which moderate
concessions in some of the duties could be made, was retained; but
France was the only power that could have an object in seriously
entertaining the proposition to enter into a negotiation. No real
reduction in duties could be given to Germany or any other country,
and it has become a recognized fact that Germany does not hesitate to
seize an opportunity to exclude the products of the United States, and
on the same grounds as support the high duties in the American tariff.
The system of drawbacks has ceased to be of much moment in our customs
policy, and in the export interest in canned goods finds its chief
exercise. Nor does a privilege to manufacture in bond affect more than
one article of importance--ores of lead containing silver. No matter
how it is regarded, the tariff of 1897 was not framed for revenue, and
in experience has not proved sufficiently productive to meet its share
of the expenditures of Government. The animus of its sponsors in
attaining the immediate political object sacrificed the more important
and permanent object of revenue.
Were the true object of customs duties--revenue--to be kept in view in
tariff legislation, it would be a simple matter to devise a measure
that would be satisfactory and highly productive of revenue. In the
fifteen hundred or more articles enumerated in the tariff schedules,
more than fourteen hundred are nonproductive, or yield so small a
return as to have in the aggregate no appreciable effect on the total
receipts. The number left after so large an exclusion can be still
further reduced without reducing the revenue one tenth; and it is from
a small number of articles, hardly twenty-five, that the great part of
the customs revenue is obtained. By reducing the rates of duties on
these to a point of highest revenue efficiency, at which the import is
not interfered with and yet not encouraged, a higher return could be
had than from the existing complicated, overloaded, and political
compilation of duties, usually imposed for any reason other than what
they will bring into the treasury.
When, therefore, the best methods of Federal taxation are broached,
the reform of the tariff stands first in importance. It is necessary
to bring it more into line with the industrial conditions of to-day,
which call for foreign markets rather than a domestic or closed
market; and for a liberal commercial policy in place of one that
regards the products of other countries, whether imported in the crude
or manufactured forms, as constituting a menace to American labor and
American interests. It calls for a systematic and intelligent
revision, which shall throw out such duties as are no longer of
service even for protection, and to reduce those that are hostile to
the products of other countries and bear in themselves the seeds of
reprisals in the future. Now that the United States is going into the
great markets with its manufactures, and obtaining a foothold against
all competitors, the invitation to retaliation holds a danger far
greater to its own interests than any that can be inflicted on other
peoples. The greater the advances made the more readily will recourse
be had to reprisals and hostile legislation; and in support of every
act appeal may be had to examples set by the United States.[8]
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Wealth of Nations, vol. i, p. 112 (Rogers's edition).
[7] Bastable. Public Finance, p. 181.
[8] "The old protectionist, with the stock arguments about the
influence of the tariff upon wages and all the rest of it, is
beginning to die out. He told us all he had to say about the 'pauper
labor' of Europe, by which he often meant the best educated and most
skillful artisans of the world. We got tired of hearing about how the
importer paid the tax, how it was Europe and England in particular
that was all the time squeezing our lives out, till nearly all of us,
being of English ancestry ourselves, wondered whether we, even, could
be so good as we hoped we were, if we had sprung from something so
essentially perverted and bad. We were told, too, that American
tourists who went to Europe and spent money there which they ought to
have squandered at home were not friends of their country, and that
they did us a particularly hostile act when they brought clothing,
statuary, or diamond rings back with them from foreign parts. A season
of high prices was a real heaven, and wars and fires were good things
because they destroyed property that would have to be replaced, and
this would create that demand which, reacting on supply, would
increase prices. To say that an article was cheap was to say that the
political party in power was no longer worthy of public confidence. It
was related that each government could make its people so rich, and
the idea was thought to have been traced down from Henry C. Carey,
that the rest of the world could be safely disregarded altogether.
"Seriously, who believes any of this stuff nowadays? The protectionist
is not reckoning with such popular impotency and stupidity. He
believes in his fellow-man, and wants to give him a helping hand. He
does not care what effect it has on England or Ireland. He is not sure
that a protective tariff in and of itself will increase the wages of
the workmen. He is even inclined to think that less wages and profits
would do well enough for every man, if it were cheaper to live and
there were not such extravagant demands upon every person from all
sides--this without being a socialist. He is certain that 'a cheap
coat' does not necessarily make 'a cheap man,' but the cheaper the
coat the better it will be for the wearer. That is what we are all
trying to do, improve our processes, increase our effective working
power, which means, if you please, to make things cheaper."--_The
Manufacturer_ (organ of the Manufacturers' Club of Philadelphia).
MENTAL DEFECTIVES AND THE SOCIAL WELFARE.
BY MARTIN W. BARR, M. D.,
CHIEF PHYSICIAN, PENNSYLVANIA TRAINING SCHOOL FOR FEEBLE-MINDED
CHILDREN, ELWYN, PA.
Periods of extraordinary efflorescence or fruitage are followed by
exhaustion and sterility not infrequently demanding the free use of
the pruning knife; and, just as we remark how frequent is idiocy the
offspring of genius, so do we find the same seeming paradox, of mental
defect in rank and increasing growth the product of this most
wonderful nineteenth century.
True, science has contributed to numbers by revealing as mental
defectives the many "misunderstood," "the backward," "the feebly
gifted," as well as by showing what was once esteemed moral perversion
to be moral imbecility; but a truth to which science also attests is,
that unstable nerve centers uniting and reacting through successive
generations, producing various forms of neuroses, evidenced in
insanity, moral and mental imbecility, idiocy and epilepsy, do show
the influence of a highly nervous age.
Our last census reports, although necessarily uncertain and
unreliable, yet show ninety thousand mental defectives, not including
the insane. Unrecognized and unacknowledged cases swell the number
easily to one hundred thousand within our present borders--how many we
are going to annex remains to be seen; but this is an enemy that
attacks not our frontiers but our hearthstones. We have reached that
point when we must conquer it, lest it should conquer us, and the
means to this end may be summed up in three words--separation,
asexualization, and permanent sequestration. "Diseases desperate grown
by desperate appliances are relieved, or not at all," and we must
recognize that heroic measures now are as essential to the welfare of
the unfortunate as to society, which will then naturally adjust itself
to new conditions. Viewing the separation and massing of these
irresponsibles--innocent victims of ignorance, debauchery, or selfish
lust--men will come to realize that a greater crime than taking is the
giving of such life; and so a greater reverence for the sacredness of
marriage, a deeper sense of the great responsibilities of parenthood,
will do more to avert this evil than the most stringent marriage laws.
That the present demands some restraint upon the ignorant and the
indifferent there can be no doubt, and laws preventing the marriage of
defectives and of their immediate descendants would go far to stem the
tide of harmful heredity.
But what to do with those now in our midst is the vital question! They
must be provided for in a way that shall insure safety to society,
economy to the State, and protection and happiness to the individual.
The answer found in the experience of half a century is, briefly,
asylums for the helpless--training schools and colonies for those
capable of becoming helpful. These in very name and nature being
widely separate, just as separate as titles and names indicate, should
be their working systems. Work among the feeble-minded, a
philanthropic movement directed first toward the idiot, soon found a
limit in dealing with a subject not trainable and but slightly if at
all improvable. Thence, diverging and broadening as idiocy became
better understood and imbecility in various phases became recognized,
it found its true province in strengthening and encouraging feeble
intellects, arousing and stimulating indolent and weak wills, and in
training and directing into healthful channels the abnormal energy of
those destitute of the moral sense. How wide the divergence can
readily be seen, as also how entirely incompatible with union must be
work further apart in reality than is the training of an imbecile and
a normal child.
[Illustration: EXCITABLE IDIOT. Practically unimprovable.
APATHETIC IDIOT. Practically unimprovable.
IDIO-IMBECILE. But slight hope of improvement.]
For the idiot, who not only can not be trained, but who in many cases
is unimprovable even in the simplest matters of self-help, nothing is
needed but that care and attention found in every well-regulated
nursery of delicate children, the _sine qua non_ being regular hours,
simple nourishing food, frequent baths, and tender mothering. As many
are paralyzed, blind, lame, or epileptic, it is desirable that the
dormitories, well ventilated, be on the same floor with the living
rooms and of easy access to bathrooms and playgrounds. Covered and
carefully guarded porches should afford the much-needed fresh air and
outdoor life in all weathers. These, with cheerful, sunny playrooms,
provided with simple toys and furnished with bright decorations
varying with the season, will contribute the maximum of pleasure for
this life of perpetual infancy. Low vitality, general poverty of the
whole physical make-up, the prevalence of phthisis and epilepsy and
kindred diseases require the daily inspection of a physician, while
the comfort and well-being of the whole, both workers and children,
are insured by a capable and sympathetic house mother.
The character of attendants is of the first importance, as these are
they who live with the children; it should combine that firmness,
tenderness, and balance that constitute an even temperament, capable
of recognizing and meeting an occasion without loss of self-control.
The duties involve not only the care of the idiots, but the training
and direction of idio-imbeciles as aids, and this dealing with natures
often wholly animal, requires a certain refinement and dignity of
character--at least an entire absence of coarseness--while a knowledge
of the simpler manual arts, and if possible of drawing and music, will
do much to soften and brighten these darkened natures. As these
qualities are valuable as well as rare, the remuneration should be in
proportion; certainly sufficient to induce permanency and to
compensate for such isolation. A life of constant wear and tear
demands also regular periods of rest, and the corps therefore should
be sufficiently large to give relief hours daily as well as vacations.
The idio-imbecile, but one remove from his weaker brother, to whose
wants he may be trained to minister, finds here his fitting place, and
the domestic service of these asylums may be largely drawn from this
class and also from that of the low-grade imbecile. Working as an aid,
never alone, always under direction, he finds in a monotonous round of
the simplest daily avocations his life happiness, his only safety from
lapsing into idiocy, and therefore his true home.
The relief to the home, the actual benefit to the State in this
housing and care of the idiot and idio-imbecile can never be fully
estimated. It is reckoned, however, in a general way that for every
idiot sequestrated the energies of two if not four normal persons are
returned to society.
Imbecility, mental or moral, congenital or accidental, is either an
inherent defect or an irrecoverable loss, an incurable disease for
which hospitals can do nothing, nor can reformatories form again that
which never has been formed. Could language be made clear enough to
enable the public mind to grasp this fact, the work of training
schools, the only hope of the imbecile, would then be simplified, and
people might be willing to accept what they can give, in the only way
in which it can be given, to be of any permanent value. As it is, the
few charlatans who profess to train and in a few years send out an
imbecile ready to take a high-school or college course not only
deceive those from whom they may gather a few thousands, but their
representations, coupled with that of a sensational press, effectually
impede the progress of a work which must eventually find its true
place in the system of public education.
Influenced by these misrepresentations, parents come with profound
idiots and high hopes of a course of training (here is one of the
misfortunes of an idiot asylum within a training school), and simply
refuse to accept a negative to their expectations. Again--to waifs and
strays, high-grade imbeciles, developing after years of labored
training proficiency in music, drawing, or some one of the industrial
arts, friends will suddenly crop up and, dazzled by what seems
phenomenal genius, seek to withdraw them just as they become useful to
the community. Little do they know of the weak will, indolent nature,
and utter lack of "go," that forbid competition with normal labor and
must forever be subject to the will of another; still less of the weak
physical build that is kept intact only by watchful care, and which
would succumb to any undue hardship. So much for the difficulties that
beset the work. Now as to the work itself.
As this must vary according to the status of the individual, a careful
study and a correct diagnosis are of primary importance in order that
the work may be fitted to the child, not the child to the work. The
plan pursued is as follows: A thorough examination--physical, mental,
and moral--is first made by the chief physician in connection with
papers properly filled out giving personal and family history. He is
then sent to the hospital for a fortnight to insure immunity from
disease. There, while perfectly free and unrestrained among his
fellows, he is under constant observation of the nurses; these
observations, carefully noted, are returned to the chief physician,
who turns both over to the principal of schools, designating the grade
in which he is to enter for probation. Here under different
environment he is again tested for some weeks and finally placed.
[Illustration: HIGH-GRADE IMBECILE.
HIGH-GRADE IMBECILE. Very improvable--can read, write, draw, etc.
LOW-GRADE IMBECILE. Only slightly improvable.]
It is hard for the uninitiated to understand that the grade, be it
high, middle, or low, is not associated with promotion and advancement
as in schools for normal children. On the contrary, it signifies the
quality and status of the individual, his limitations, his
possibilities, and consequently determines almost unfailingly the
training for his life work; not by any hard-and-fast lines, but by a
general mapping out of means which experience has proved will best
insure his development, because best suited to his needs. Every
latitude is allowed and, as the comfort of both the teacher and the
entire class depends upon each going to his own place, there is easy
and natural transference according to the necessity indicated by
either progress or retrogression; but the varied occupations in each
grade give ample scope for indulgence of individual proclivity in the
means of development, and it is found that the original diagnosis,
based upon experience, rarely errs.
The motto of the schools--"We learn by doing; the working hand makes
strong the working brain"--shows manual training to be the basis of
the scheme of development, varied for each grade to suit the
intelligence. Thus classified, various occupations are arranged and
presented with the double intent of securing all-round development,
and of giving at the same time opportunity for choice according to
individual bent, the child being gradually permitted to devote himself
more exclusively to that in which he shows a tendency to excel, and to
gain a certain automatic ease in what shall prove the initial of a
life employment. A knowledge of writing and of numbers is acquired
incidentally as a necessary part of these occupations in daily
practice, and arithmetic, taught with objects, is chiefly counting,
separating into fractional parts, and practical measurements. Books
are used rather as a convenient means of attracting and holding
attention while inducing habits of consecutive thinking than for a
knowledge of facts to be memorized. Those who can learn to read gain
naturally a means of self-entertainment, of self-instruction, hence a
certain amount of culture, so long as protected in an institution from
indiscriminate and pernicious literature.
The low-grade imbecile, but a slight degree removed from the
idio-imbecile, is, like him, totally incapable of grasping artificial
signs or symbols. He can therefore never learn to read or write;
figures have no meaning for him, nor numbers, beyond the very simplest
counting acquired in the daily repetition of some simple task such as
knitting, netting, braiding rope, straw, or knotting twine. The
excitation of interest in these, which will also give hand and arm
power, the arousing of the sluggish, indolent will, through the
stimulus of pleasurable emotions, the physical development by means of
the various drills and the moral influence of refined, orderly
surroundings--these, together with some practical work of house,
garden, or farm, which forms part of the daily routine, are all that
school life can do for him.
[Illustration: MORAL IMBECILE OF HIGH GRADE.
MORAL IMBECILE OF MIDDLE GRADE.
MORAL IMBECILE, LOW GRADE.]
From this preparation he passes to the industrial department, where he
receives training in that occupation which the school has indicated
for him, becoming in his limited way a useful and contented member of
a community which should be his life home. As both of these types
develop either extreme docility or perversity--the one quiet, gentle,
obedient, following any suggestion even of a comrade's stronger will;
the other obstinate, indolent, often brutal and cruel--the necessity
for constant guardianship is therefore self-evident.
When we consider that the training of a high-grade imbecile takes four
times the period commonly allotted to a normal child, some idea of the
vital energy expended on the training of the lower grades may be found
in the following example:
I find in our museum of educational work a little ball which I am
inclined to regard the most valuable thing in the whole collection.
The boy who made it was a low-grade imbecile. His hand against every
man, he fancied every man's against him. Always under strict custodial
care, that he might harm neither himself nor others, he would vent his
spleen in tearing his clothing. His teacher, a woman of rare patience
and devotedness, sat beside him one day, tearing strips of old linen
and laying them in order. "See, Willie, let us make some pretty strips
and lay them so." His wonder grew apace at seeing her doing what he
had been reproved for doing; at once he responded, and a new bond of
sympathy was established between them. She was playing his game--the
only one, poor little lad, that he was capable of--and he joined in.
"Now, we will draw out the pretty threads and lay them in rows." For
weeks the boy found quiet pastime in this occupation, and the violent
nature grew quieter in proportion. One day the teacher said, "Let us
tie these threads together and make a long string." It took him months
and months to learn to tie those knots, but meanwhile his attendants
were having breathing space. "Now we will wind this into a pretty
ball, and I will cover all you make for the boys to play with"; and a
new occupation was added to his meager list.
The next link in this chain of development was a lesson in knitting.
Again, through months of patient teaching, it was at last
accomplished, and the boy to the day of his death found his life
happiness in knitting caps for the children, in place of tearing both
them and their clothing. You see the teacher was wise enough to
utilize the natural activities of the child and divert evil
propensities into healthful channels. Had she brought knitting and
bright yarn or anything foreign to him first, it would in truth have
been fitting new cloth to old garments and the rent would have been
widened: his obstinacy would have been aroused, and he would have
continued to tear to the end of the chapter.
[Illustration: HIGH-GRADE IMBECILES (FEEBLY GIFTED) AT SLOYD WORK.]
The imbecile of middle grade receives that fuller presentation of work
suited to fuller capacity. Some time is devoted to the three "Rs," as
it is found that attention may be aroused and concentrated in the
phonetic drills, more especially if associated with pictures, and the
drawing of the objects named free-hand; thus eye, ear, and hand are
encouraged to work simultaneously. Those who accomplish finally the
reading of short simple stories not only enjoy evenings in the
library, but may be enabled to glean suggestions for the various
handicrafts for which they are being trained. This effort at quick
observation and original thinking is further carried forward in the
ambidextrous movements of free-hand drawing, designing, and sketching
from life--finding ready and practical application in the daily use of
tools. The value of the rule and the try-square is tested in the
manufacture of the various useful articles in both paper and wood
included under the head of sloyd, and "a boy can not learn to take a
straight shaving off a plank," says Ruskin, "or to drive a fine curve
without faltering, or to lay a brick level in the mortar, without
learning a multitude of other matters which life of man could never
teach him."
Equally useful to the girl in the workroom as to the boy in the shop
is this training of a ready eye, this quick intuition of balance and
proportion, this practice of obedience of hand and arm to brain, until
it becomes automatic. To both, therefore, the value of such
preparation will be incalculable. It is noticeable that boys of this
grade turn out as good workers in the ordinary crafts of shoemaking,
carpentering, and house painting as those of higher grade who,
although capable of grasping more intelligently the details of work,
yet do not bring to it that energy and perseverance of one who finds
in it "this one thing I do." With the imbecile of high grade, able to
accomplish studies equal to about the first intermediate of the public
schools, there is a diffusion of interest; the intelligence broadens
rather than deepens during the school period in natural response to
environment. With greater grasp of numerical values and of letters he
attains proficiency impossible to the lower grades in drawing, in
music, in printing, and in cabinet work. Other industries will
probably be provided for him as the demand increases, for it must be
remembered that this is a class whose needs have been the last to be
recognized in a work begun, as I have before said, for the idiot.
Regarded as queer, unlike other children--unable to keep up--he has,
after an unsuccessful trial at school, been kept at home, in some
cases an aid, in others a tyrant, to those relatives charged with his
care.
Changed conditions of both family and school, fortunately for him,
combine to render this no longer possible, as absence of proper
training is always certain to result in deterioration. The pressure
upon the primary schools in the struggle for higher education leaves
no time to contend with dull, backward children. In the family the
care-takers grow fewer in proportion as the home-makers become
home-winners, and so these feeble ones are a burden instead of an aid
in the ordinary household offices.
The next hope is a training school where, with false hopes fostered by
ignorance and sensationalism, they are entered, and after a few years,
a time all too short for any lasting benefit, a sentimentality equally
stupid withdraws them from that guardianship absolutely essential,
with just that little knowledge which will render them more dangerous
to society, because less recognizable--an evil element perpetuating an
evil growth. Under both conditions these unfortunates have suffered
from that lack of constant care and supervision which should be theirs
from the cradle to the grave.
The separation of backward children in the schools and the placing of
them in special classes for special training is the first step in the
right direction. Here, after sufficient time for observation and
diagnosing by teacher and physician, the defectives so adjudged will
naturally drift to the training schools for the feeble-minded; these,
if relieved of the odium as well as the care of their helpless
population, will then be encouraged to arrange for this brighter class
of defectives industries which will provide not only for development
and happiness, but will largely aid in maintenance. The recognition of
the necessity for this weeding out of the schools, having place first
on the Continent, next in England, and later in our own country, marks
an era in the national as well as in the special schools. Both will be
benefited largely, and formal expression of this, found in the
addition to our National Educational Association of a department
representing the training of all classes of defectives, is one of the
most encouraging signs of the times.
[Illustration: MIDDLE-GRADE IMBECILES.]
The same experience which dictates the separation of the idiot from
the imbecile, the backward from the normal child, urges also that a
permanent sequestration would tend alike to the safety and happiness
of the normal and abnormal classes. The experiment made of preparing
and sending out into the world these irresponsibles has proved, to say
the least, not encouraging, and the advisability of their permanent
detention has become self-evident.
The heads of training schools here are a unit in urging that provision
be made for those who have reached the limit of school progress. That
experience has reached a similar conclusion in England is testified
in the munificent gift lately made to the Royal Albert Asylum, and by
the opinion of its superintendent, Dr. T. Telford-Smith, thus clearly
expressed:
"It is yearly more noticeable that the public mind is coming gradually
but surely to recognize the threefold value of the work of such
institutions as the Royal Albert Asylum. The educational and the
custodial aspects early aroused the sympathies of the charitable; but
the preventive aspect is another which must force itself upon all who
thoughtfully consider the subject. The far-reaching and inexorable law
of heredity is written large for those who study the imbecile."
The following paragraph, from a daily paper, shows that, in America at
least, public opinion and the acts of the legislature have become ripe
for action:
"The State of Connecticut is about to try a curious experiment in
social legislation, having passed a law forbidding any man or woman,
imbecile or feeble-minded, to marry under forty-five years of age, the
penalty being imprisonment for not less than three years; and persons
aiding and abetting are also liable. The hope of the legislature is to
keep down dégenerate families."
That this experiment is wise and justifiable who can doubt?
[Illustration: LOW-GRADE IMBECILES. No. 1, obstinate, perverse,
indolent; No. 2, gentle and obedient.]
To glance at another and sadder, but not less real, side of the same
question, can any one doubt but that the adolescent and adult female
imbecile needs lifelong care and protection? Surely the noble gift to
the asylum by Sir Thomas Storey of a home for forty such cases is a
wise, far-seeing, and statesmanlike act.
It is greatly to be hoped that this noble example may be speedily
emulated on both sides of the sea, and that each State may shortly
possess, in addition to its training school, its own colony farm with
all the industries of a village, drawing its workers from the
well-directed energies of a carefully guarded community. Cottages,
each with its house mother, would insure that sense of home, and that
affectionate and sympathetic oversight so essential to this society
composed of those who are always children, while measures, which
science has already pointed out and experience proved as advisable,
might, if protected by wise legislation, permit less vigilance on the
part of care-takers and consequent happiness because of greater
freedom to its members.
It is a happy coincidence that Massachusetts, the pioneer State in the
work among the feeble-minded, should in its fifty-first year celebrate
the beginning of its second half century by the inauguration of this
most eventful step in the onward progress of the work. The training
school at Waltham has lately purchased sixteen hundred and sixty acres
of land for the establishment of a colony which is to have natural and
healthful growth from the fostering care of the parent institution.
As these colonies increase, drawing from society a pernicious element
and transforming it under watchful care into healthful growth, may not
in time the national Government, finding these homes of prevention a
more excellent way than prison houses of cure for ill, be induced to
provide a national colony for this race more to be commiserated
because of a childhood more hopeless than that of the two others in
our midst on whom so much has been expended?
THE WHEAT PROBLEM AGAIN.
BY EDWARD ATKINSON.
In a recent article in the North American Review, Mr. John Hyde, the
statistician of the United States Department of Agriculture, a
gentleman of very high authority and repute, presents this problem in
such terms as to throw a doubt upon the validity of any forecast of
the potential increase in the product of wheat, or, in fact, of any
crop in this country. Without referring to myself by name, he yet
makes it very plain that he does not attach any value to my recent
forecast of wheat production printed in the Popular Science Monthly
for December, 1898.
On the other hand, he rightly says that since Tyndall's address to the
British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 no treatise
presented to that association has excited so general an interest or
provoked so much unfavorable criticism as Sir William Crookes's recent
utterances on the subject of the approaching scarcity in the supply of
wheat.
Mr. Hyde disclaims any intention to give his own views, but yet no one
can read his treatise without noting a substantial agreement with Sir
William Crookes, perhaps almost unconsciously to himself. In his
closing paragraph he says: "To discuss the extent to which under
conceivable conditions the United States may, _notwithstanding the
somewhat dubious outlook_, still continue to contribute to the food
supply of other nations, would be little more than speculation."
The Italics are my own.
I venture to point out that the use of the word "speculation" is an
example of many instances. Like a dog, one may give a word a bad name,
yet it may be a good dog and a very good word when rightly used. In
the true and very innocent meaning of the word "speculation" we find
exactly what the public has a right to expect and even to demand from
the Department of Agriculture. In Webster's Dictionary I find that,
when used in such a connection as this problem of the potential of
this country in farm productions, the word "speculation" stands for "a
mental view of anything in its various aspects and relations;
contemplation; intellectual examination."
If any "mental view" has yet been taken in the Department of
Agriculture of the proportion of the land of this country which may be
termed "arable," I have yet to find the record. If any "contemplation"
has been devoted to the proportions of this arable land which may be
devoted to different crops in each section, I have been remiss in not
securing the reports. If any "mental view" has been taken of the
relative area now devoted to each principal crop, and that which may
be so devoted hereafter in order to meet the prospective demand upon
the land, either for the supply of our own population or of other
nations, where is the record? If there is no such "speculation" now of
record, is it not time that a true agricultural survey corresponding
to our geologic and geodetic surveys should be entered upon? I have
reason to believe that such surveys have been made by many European
states in which all the arable land in some kingdoms is classified,
listed, and so recorded that any one wishing to know the best place
for any special product can get the information by reference to the
proper department of the Government.
I have had occasion to make several studies of this kind. In order to
inform myself on the potential of the South in the production of
cotton, I undertook a study of the physical geography and climatology
of the cotton States and of other cotton-producing countries nearly
forty years ago. The results of this research were first given in
Cheap Cotton by Free Labor, published in 1861. In that pamphlet and in
many treatises following, finally in an address in Atlanta, in 1880, a
true forecast or "speculation" or "intellectual examination" will be
found of the production of the cotton fiber, the potential of the
future and of the cotton-seed-oil industry, then almost unheard of in
this country. In 1880 I also entered upon my first "speculation" (not
in the market) on the lines of a "contemplation" or forecast of the
effect of agricultural machinery applied to our wheat land, coupled
with the prospective reduction in the cost of carrying wheat to
England, upon the condition of the American farmer and the British
landlord. That forecast of prosperity to our farmers in the supply of
bread at low cost to our kin beyond the sea has been justified at
every point and in every detail. I therefore ventured to review Sir
William Crookes's address, and I am well assured that what Mr. Hyde
now calls a "somewhat dubious outlook" is subject to no doubt whatever
as to our ability to continue our full supply for domestic consumption
and export for the next century.
Let me now repeat again what I have often said: statistics are good
servants, but very bad masters. I long since ceased to put any great
reliance upon averages of crops, wages, or products covering wide
areas and varying conditions, unless I could find out, _first_, the
personal equation of the man who compiled them; _second_, ascertain
what he knew himself about the subject of which his statistics or
figures were the symbols; and, _third_, unless I could verify these
great averages from one or more typical areas of farm land, or from
one or more representative factories or workshops, of the conditions
of which I could myself obtain personal information.
General statistics and averages of farm products and earnings I regard
with more suspicion than almost any others because of the immense
variation in conditions.
I have sometimes almost come to the conclusion that so many of the
figures of the United States census are mere statistical rubbish as to
throw a doubt on nearly all the schedules. Yet without accurate
statistics on many points, many of them yet to be secured, the conduct
of our national affairs must become as uncertain as would be the
conduct of any great business corporation without a true ledger
account and a trial balance. Hence the necessity for a permanent
census bureau and for a careful "speculation" or "intellectual" and
intelligent examination and "contemplation" or study of the facts
about our land by which our future welfare must be governed.
A good beginning has been made by the authorities of many States, yet
more by the body of well-trained men in charge of the Agricultural
Experiment Station, in whose support too much can not be said. To them
I appealed when trying to get an adequate conception of our potential
in wheat.
When we think of the blunders which have been made in very recent
years, we may well have some suspicion that we may still be very
ignorant on many points about our own country. Who really knows very
much about the great middle section of the South, what is called the
"Land of the Sky," comprising the upland plateaus and mountain
sections of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,
eastern Tennessee, and Kentucky? Within this area, as large as France
and twice as large as Great Britain, will be found timber and minerals
equal to both the countries named, and a potential in agriculture
equal to either, as yet very sparsely populated.
Yet under a craze for centrifugal expansion we are now in danger of
trying to develop tropical islands far away, already somewhat densely
peopled, where white men can not work and live, to our detriment,
danger, and loss, while we fail to see that if we expand centripetally
by the occupation and use of the most healthy and productive section
of our own country, we may add immensely to our prosperity, our
wealth, to our profit without cost and without militarism. This
sparsely settled Land of the Sky is greater in area and far greater in
its potential than the Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Porto Rico
combined. Verily, it seems as if common sense were a latent and
sluggish force, often endangered by the noisy and blatant influence of
the venal politician and the greed of the unscrupulous advocates of
vassal colonies who now attempt to pervert the power of government to
their own purposes of private gain.
Witness the blunders of the past:
We nearly gave away Oregon because it was held not to be worth
retaining.
When the northern boundary of Wisconsin was being determined, it was
put as far north as it was then supposed profitable farming could ever
extend, excluding Minnesota, now one of our greatest sources of wheat.
The Great American Desert in my own school atlas covered a large part
of the most fertile land now under cultivation.
What blunders are we now making for lack of "speculation" or
"intellectual examination" as to the future of American farming and
farm lands?
On one point to which Mr. Hyde refers I must cry _peccavi_. He rebukes
the editor of the Popular Science Monthly for admitting an article in
which a potential of 400,000,000 bushels of wheat is attributed to the
State of Idaho. The total depravity of the type-writing machine caused
the mechanism to spell Montana in the letters I-d-a-h-o. What I
imputed to Idaho is true of Montana, if the Chief of the Agricultural
Experiment Stations of Montana is a competent witness, if all its
arable land were devoted to wheat. It will be observed that I
mentioned Idaho incidentally (meaning Montana), taking no cognizance
of the estimate given, because it was at present of no practical
importance.
I have expressed my distrust of great averages in respect to
agriculture and farm products.
In illustration of this fallacy, the figures presented by Mr. Hyde
will now be dealt with. It is held that in 1930, which is the year
when Sir William Crookes predicts starvation among the bread-eating
people of the world for lack of wheat (as if good bread could only be
made from wheat), the population of this country may be computed at
130,000,000. The requirements of that year for our own consumption Mr.
Hyde estimates at 700,000,000 bushels of wheat, 1,250,000,000 bushels
of oats, 3,450,000,000 bushels of corn (maize), and 100,000,000 tons
of hay; and, although other products are not named by him, we may
assume a corresponding increase.
Subsequently Mr. Hyde gives the present delusive average yields per
acre of the whole country, and then throws a doubt on the future
progress of agricultural science, saying, "Whatever agricultural
science may be able to do in the next thirty years, up to the present
time it has only succeeded in arresting that decline in the rate of
production with which we have been continually threatened." Without
dealing at present with this want of and true consideration of or
"speculation" upon the progress made in the last decade under the lead
of the experiment stations and other beginnings in remedying the
wasteful and squalid methods that have been so conspicuous in pioneer
farming, let us take Mr. Hyde's averages and see what demand upon land
the requirements of 1930 will make, even at the present meager average
product per acre.
Mr. Hyde apparently computes this prospective product as one that will
be required for the domestic consumption of 130,000,000 people by
ratio to our present product. He ignores the fact that our present
product suffices for 75,000,000, with an excess of live stock,
provisions, and dairy products exported nearly equal in value to all
the grain exported, and in excess of the exports of wheat. If we can
increase proportionally in one class of products, why not in another?
Whichever pays best will be produced and exported.
_1897 and 1930 compared.--Data of 1897._
------+------------------------+-----------------+----------------------
| Products. |Average per acre.| Area required.
------+------------------------+-----------------+----------------------
Maize | 1,902,967,933 bushels. | 23.8 bushels. | 125,150 square miles.
Wheat | 530,149,168 " | 13.4 " | 61,660 " "
Oats | 698,767,809 " | 27.2 " | 40,200 " "
Hay | 60,664,770 tons. | 1.43 " | 66,290 " "
| | |----------------------
Total in square miles | 293,300 square miles.
-------------------------------------------------+----------------------
All other farm crops carry the total to less than 400,000 square miles
now under the plow, probably not exceeding 360,000.
Prospective demand of 1930, at the same meager average product per
acre, without progress in agricultural science:
------+------------------------+---------------+----------------------
| Crop called for. | Per acre. | Area required.
------+------------------------+---------------+----------------------
Maize | 3,450,000,000 bushels. | 23.8 bushels. | 226,600 square miles.
Wheat | 700,000,000 " | 13.4 " | 81,600 " "
Oats | 1,250,000,000 " | 27.2 " | 70,800 " "
Hay | 100,000,000 tons. | 1.43 " | 109,400 " "
| | |----------------------
Total in square miles | 488,400 square miles.
-----------------------------------------------+----------------------
Assuming all land under the plow in 1930 in the ratio as above, the
area of all now in all crops 400,000 square miles--an excessive
estimate--that year (1930) will call for 667,000 square miles of
arable land in actual cultivation.
I have been accustomed to consider one half our national domain,
exclusive of Alaska, good arable land in the absence of any
"speculation" on that point in the records of the Department of
Agriculture; but from the returns given by the chiefs of the
experiment stations and secretaries of agriculture of the States
hereafter cited, that estimate may be increased probably to two
thirds, or 2,000,000 square miles of arable land out of a total of
3,000,000 square miles, omitting Alaska.
Assuming that we possess 2,000,000 square miles of arable land,
capable at least of producing the present meager average product cited
above, the conditions of 1930 will be graphically presented on the
following diagram:
_Prospective Use of Land in the Year 1930 on Present Crop Average._
[Sidenote: Arable land assumed to be 2,000,000 square miles in the
outer lines of the diagram.]
+----------+----------+----------+--------------+------------+----------+
| Oats, | Wheat, | Hay, |Miscellaneous.| Maize, | Wheat |
| 70,800 | 81,600 | 109,400 |Roots, cotton,|Indian corn,| for |
|sq. miles.|sq. miles.|sq. miles.|tobacco, etc.,| 226,600 | export, |
+----------| | |168,600 sq. m.| sq. miles. | 143,000 |
| +----------+----------| Excessive. | |sq. miles.|
| +--------------+------------+----------+
|Arable land unassigned 1,200,000 square miles.|
|Deduct for cities, towns, parks, |
| and reserves of all kinds 200,000 " " |
| --------- |
| Reserve for future use 1,000,000 " " |
| |
| Forest, mountain, arid, etc., not counted, about 1,000,000 square |
| miles, not included in these lines or squares. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
No reduction on area cultivated on prospective improvement in the
present methods of farming, although it may be assumed that the
prospective increase of crop per acre will exert great influence.
If the facts should be in 1930 consistent with Mr. Hyde's
"speculation" it would therefore appear that our ability to meet the
domestic demand of 1930 with proportionate export of cattle,
provisions, and dairy products, and to set apart a little patch of
land for the export of 1,226,000,000 bushels of wheat raised at the
rate of only 13.4 bushels per acre from 143,000 square miles of land
will be met by the cultivation of not exceeding 700,000 square miles
out of 2,000,000 available.
I should not venture to question the conclusions emanating from the
Department of Agriculture, or the deductions of so eminent a scientist
as Sir William Crookes, had I not taken the usual precaution of a
business man in studying a business question. I went to the men who
know the subject as well as the figures on which statistics are to be
compiled.
Being supplied by the Popular Science Monthly with one hundred proofs
of the first nine and a half pages of the December article in which
the terms of the problem are stated, I sent those proofs to the chiefs
of the experiment stations and to the secretaries of agriculture in
all the States from which any considerable product of wheat is now or
may be hereafter derived; also to many makers of wheat harvesters; to
the secretaries of Chambers of Commerce, and to several economic
students in the wheat-growing States. This preliminary study was
accompanied by the following circular of inquiry:
BOSTON, MASS., _October 5, 1898_.
_To the Chiefs of the Agricultural Experiment Stations and others in
Authority_:
Calling your attention to the inclosed advance sheets of an article
which will by and by appear in the Popular Science Monthly, I beg to
put to you certain questions.
If the matter interests you, will you kindly fill up the blanks below
and let me have your replies within the present month of October, to
the end that I may compile them and give a digest of the results? I
shall state in the article that I am indebted to you and others for
the information submitted.
Area of the State of....................... square miles.
1. What proportion of this area do you believe to be arable land of
fair quality, including pasture that might be put under the plow?
Answer ................... square miles.
2. What proportion is now in forest or mountain sections which may not
be available for agriculture for a long period?
Answer ................... square miles.
3. What has been done or may be done by irrigation?
...........................................................................
...........................................................................
............................
4. What proportion of the arable land above measured should you
consider suitable to the production of wheat under general conditions
such as are given in the text, say, a stable price of one dollar per
bushel in London?
Answer ................... square miles.
5. To what extent, in your judgment, is wheat becoming the cash or
surplus crop of a varied system of agriculture as distinct from the
methods which prevail in the opening of new lands of cropping with
wheat for a term of years?
....................................................................
What further remarks can you add which will enable me to elucidate
this case, to complete the article and to convey a true impression of
the facts to English readers?
....................................................................
....................................................................
....................................................................
Your assistance in this matter will be gratefully received.
Respectfully submitted,
EDWARD ATKINSON.
To this circular I received twenty-four detailed replies, containing
statistics mostly very complete; also many suggestive letters, in
every case giving full support to the general views which I had
submitted in the proof sheets. It has been impossible for me to give
individual credit within the limits of a magazine article to the
gentlemen who have so fully supplied the data. Space will only permit
me to submit a digest of the more important facts in a table derived
from these replies:
-------------+-----------------------------------------+-------------
| FROM RETURNS MADE TO MY INQUIRY. |From United
|----------------+----------+-------------|States report
NAME. | Area of State. | Arable. | Suitable to | in wheat,
| | | wheat. | 1897.
-------------+----------------+----------+-------------+-------------
Minnesota | 84,287 | 66,000 | 50,000 | 7,189
South Dakota | 76,000 | 42,500 | 40,000 | 4,187
North Dakota | 74,312 | 50,000 | 50,000 | 4,300
Illinois | 56,000 | 54,000 | 20,000 | 2,292
Missouri | 68,000 | 64,000 | 64,000 | 2,448
Wisconsin | 56,000 | 35,000 | 35,000 | 961
|----------------+----------+-------------+------------
| 414,599 | 311,500 | 259,000 | 21,372
|================+==========+=============+===========
Texas | 269,694 | 200,000 | 100,000 | 700
California | 158,360 | 54,000 | 30,000 | 5,062
Montana | 145,310 | 30,000 | 25,000 | 109
Idaho | 87,000 | 30,000 | 15,000 | 192
|----------------+----------+-------------+------------
| 660,364 | 314,000 | 170,000 | 6,063
|================+==========+=============+============
Total | 1,074,963 | 625,500 | 429,000 | 27,435
-------------+----------------+----------+-------------+------------
I do not give the data of the Eastern and Southern States, and I have
selected only the most complete data of the other States, choosing the
more conservative where two returns have been made from one State.
The foregoing States produced a little over one third of the wheat
crop of 1897. They comprise a little over one third the area of the
land of the United States, excluding Alaska.
The list covers States like Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, now
very fully occupied relatively to Texas, Montana, and Idaho, as yet
but sparsely settled.
Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and
Washington combined far exceed the above list in wheat production;
but, as I have no complete data from these States, I can only say that
the national or census statistics, as far as they go, develop
corresponding conditions to those above given. The very small product
of Texas and Montana, even of Idaho, as compared with the claimed
potential, will attract notice, and perhaps excite incredulity. But
let it be remembered that in 1880 the Territory of Dakota yielded less
than 3,000,000 bushels of wheat, while in 1898 the two States of North
and South Dakota, formerly in one Territory, claim to have produced
100,000,000 bushels. Perhaps it will then be admitted that the
potential of Montana, and even of Idaho, may be attained in some
measure corresponding to the reports from those States; but as yet
their product is a negligible quantity, as that of Dakota was only
twenty years since.[9]
Again, let it be remembered that Texas will produce a cotton crop,
marketed in 1898-'99, above the average of the five ante-war crops of
the whole country, and nearly equal to the largest crop ever grown in
the United States before the war. Texas could not only produce the
present entire cotton crop of the United States but of the world, on
but a small part of her land which is well suited to cotton. When
these facts are considered, perhaps the potential of that great State
in wheat and other grain, in cattle and in sheep, as well as in
cotton, may begin to be comprehended.
The writer is well aware that this treatment of a great problem is
very incomplete, but it is the best that the leisure hours of a very
busy business life would permit. If it discloses the general ignorance
of our resources, the total inadequacy of many of our official
statistics, the lack of any real agricultural survey, and the
necessity for a reorganization and concentration of the scientific
departments of the Government as well as of a permanent census bureau,
it will have served a useful purpose.
If it also serves to call attention to the meager average crops and
the poor quality of our agriculture as a whole down to a very recent
period, it may suggest even to those to whose minds the statistics of
the past convey but gloomy and "doubtful views" of the future, that
the true progress in scientific agriculture could only begin when
substantially all the fertile land in the possession of the Government
had either been given away or otherwise distributed. So long as "sod
crops" and the single-crop system yielded adequate returns to
unskilled farmers, no true science of agriculture could be expected,
any more than a large product of wool can be hoped for in States where
it has been wittily said that "every poor man keeps one cur dog, and
every d--d poor man keeps two or more."
Finally, if I shall have drawn attention to the very effective work
which is being done in the agricultural experiment stations by men of
first-rate ability, I shall have drawn attention to a great fact. This
work has already led to a complete revolution from the old practice
of maltreating land, and to the renovation of soils that had been
partially exhausted. Governor Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, long since
condemned the old methods of Southern agriculture by telling his
hearers, "The niggers skinned the land and the white men skinned the
niggers." We are changing all that by new and progressive methods. I
hope that in this recognition of the work of the experiment stations I
shall have made some return for the attention which has been given to
my inquiry by so many of my correspondents that the space assigned me
forbids a list of my authorities being given by name.
When the suggestion is made from the Department of Agriculture that
all that science has yet accomplished has been to stop a tendency to a
lessened production from the land now under the plow, and when it is
even suggested that in 1930 the present meager average of crops per
acre may still exist, it seems to me that little credit is given to
the good work already accomplished in the short period in which the
separate Department of Agriculture has been represented in the
Cabinet, especially in the last five or six years, while the
suggestion itself shows very little consideration of the great work of
the experiment stations.
Unless it can be proved that my correspondents and myself have entered
into a conspiracy to mislead the public in dealing with the potential
of this country in wheat production, nearly all the deductions from
the figures of the past must be considered mere statistical rubbish.
These statistics cover sections and States in which wheat should never
be grown or attempted in competition with the true wheat soils and
climate. As well might misplaced iron furnaces, built to boom city
lots where there are no favorable conditions for the production of
iron, be included in an average and held up as a standard of our
potential in iron and steel production.
In my efforts to discover the rule of progress in the arts and
occupations of the people of this country, it has become plain that in
ratio to the application of science and invention to every art the
quantity of product is increased, the number of workmen is relatively
diminished, the price of the product tends to diminish, while the
wages or earnings of those who do the work are augmented. I have
investigated many branches of industry, and find evidence conclusive
to my own mind that such is the law of industrial development. This
rule is subject to temporary variations under the restriction of
statutes. In my own judgment, the so-called protective principle or
policy of interference with commerce by imposing fines on foreign
imports has retarded the progress of the specially protected arts, and
has in some measure obstructed the diversity of manufactures; but the
opposite policy of absolutely free trade in our domestic traffic over
a greater area and among a much larger number of people than have
elsewhere secured their own liberty has been so much more potent in
its progressive influence as to have lessened the evils of the
restrictions on foreign trade.
According to my observation, all the efforts to regulate railroad
charges by State legislation and under the interstate commerce act
have greatly retarded the progress of the railway, and have deprived
great States, notably Texas, of any service at all commensurate to the
demand which might otherwise have been supplied to the mutual benefit
of the owners of the railways and the inhabitants of the State. The
most serious retarding influence, especially evil in its effect upon
farmers, was the useless panic of 1893, caused by the silver
craze--that is to say, by the effort to enact a force bill by which
the producers of our great crops would have been compelled to accept
money of half the purchasing power of that to which their industry had
been long adjusted. This caused a temporary paralysis of industry, in
which I think none suffered so much as the farmers of the country.
But admitting these temporary variations, I find the same rule
governing the products of the farm that governs the mine, the factory,
and the workshop--namely, a lessening of the number occupied in ratio
to the product; a great reduction in the cost of labor; an increased
return in due proportion of the skill and intelligence of the farmer;
a rapid reduction in the farm mortgages, ending at the present date in
making the farmers of the grain-growing States the creditors of the
world, especially those occupied upon wheat.
But in the development of this progress we find the reverse of the
practice in the factory and the workshop. The most important
applications of science and invention led first to what might be
called the manufacture of wheat on an extensive method of making a
single crop on great areas of land. That phase has about spent its
force; the great farms are in process of division; the single-crop
system has about ended; the intensive system of making a larger
product from a lessened area with alternation and variation in crops
is rapidly taking the place of former methods.
Therefore, while many branches of manufacturing tend more and more to
the collective method, the tendency in agriculture is more and more to
individualism in dealing with the land itself, coupled with collective
ownership in the more expensive farm machinery, in creameries, cheese
factories, and the like. We are apparently at a halfway stage in this
revolution of agriculture. The intelligent and intensive methods of
breeding cattle and sheep is also rapidly taking the place of the
semibarbarous conditions of the ranch.
If these points are well taken, the very suggestion that we must
compute the land which should be under the plow in 1890 in order to
supply the needs of 130,000,000 people on the basis of the imperfect
statistics and inadequate data of the past, becomes almost an
impertinence. It is much more probable that the 400,000 square miles
which now meet the needs of 75,000,000 people, with an enormous excess
for export, will in 1930 still suffice for the domestic supply of
130,000,000 people, with a proportionate export corresponding to the
present.
If the product of the farms of the West now yielding the largest
crops, or of the renovated lands of the South now yielding the best
crops, be taken as the average standard of the near future, as they
should be, then it may be true in 1930, as it is now, that one fifth
of the arable land of this country when put under the plow will still
suffice for all existing demands, the remainder of our great domain
extending the promise of future abundance and welfare to the yet
greater numbers who will occupy the land a century hence.
I may add that in the course of a very friendly correspondence with
Sir William Crookes, while we are still at variance in our estimates
of the area which may be converted to the production of wheat in this
country without trenching upon any other product, we are wholly at an
agreement on a most material point. I quote from one of his letters:
"Under the present wasteful method of cultivation there will be in a
limited number of years an insufficient supply of wheat. Apply
artificial fertilizers judiciously, and the supply may be increased
indefinitely." I would only venture to add to the judgment of so
eminent a writer the words "or natural," to the end that the paragraph
should read, "Apply artificial or natural fertilizers judiciously, and
the supply can be increased indefinitely."
Many years ago I was asked among others, "What would be the next great
discovery of science or invention?" To which I replied, "A supply of
nitrogen at low cost." Has not that discovery been made in the recent
development of the functions of the bacteria which, living and dying
upon the leguminous plants, dissociate the nitrogen of the atmosphere
and convert it through the plant to the renovation of the soil? Is not
the invention of methods of nitrifying the soil by distributing the
germs of bacteria one of the most wonderful discoveries of science
ever yet attained? Can any one yet measure the potential of any given
area of land in any part of this country in the production of any one
of its great crops? That there is a limit may be admitted. Can any one
venture to say that any of our average crops yet approach beyond a
small fractional measure the true limit of production, whatever it may
be, either in cotton, maize, wheat, or any other product of the soil?
In this, as in many other developments of the theory of evolution, the
factor of mental energy, which is the prime factor in all material
production, may have been or is almost wholly ignored. We are ceasing
to treat the soil as a mine subject to exhaustion, but we have as yet
made only a beginning in treating it as an instrument of production
which will for a long period respond in its increasing product in
exact ratio to the mental energy which is applied to the cultivation
of the land.
FOOTNOTE:
[9] I have been permitted to review the detailed statements of the
accounts of one of the great enterprises which I have called the
manufacture of wheat on a large scale on various large farms,
separated one from another but under one control, aggregating more
than twenty thousand acres, in North Dakota. They are managed mainly
from a long distance through agents and foremen, therefore at a
relative disadvantage compared to a farmer owning his own land, acting
as his own foreman, and saving heavily in expense. Such farmers,
making no charge for their own time, are computed to have a cash
advantage of one dollar an acre.
A large part of this land has been cropped in wheat for twenty-four
years, one farm of six thousand acres showing an average in excess of
eighteen bushels per acre for the term of seventeen years. The details
of the product of other farms are not given, but this may be
considered a rule. Of course, this cropping can not be carried on
indefinitely. The land is now being allowed to rest, and other crops,
such as maize, oats, barley, millet, and timothy, are to some extent
being raised in rotation, but not to the extent in which individual
wheat farms are now passing into rotation, especially in Minnesota.
In this enterprise the manufacture of wheat is the main purpose, but
under the changed conditions on the small farms in Minnesota wheat is
becoming rather the cash or excess crop in a rotation of four; at
present, in North Dakota, wheat constitutes about three fourths the
total product.
In these accounts of this great farm are included all charges of every
name and nature except what might be called the rent of land: the
labor, the harvesting and thrashing, the general expense including the
foreman and all other charges; the office expenses, the taxes, the
insurance, and, when summer fallow is introduced, the cost of the
summer fallow. Suffice it that these figures for 1898--a year of high
charge for seed and one which yielded a fraction over the average in
product--prove conclusively an average of all charges of less than
five dollars an acre for the cost of the product. In different years
under these conditions the cost of the wheat varies from a little over
twenty cents to approximately thirty-five cents per bushel. The cost
of oats, which are cultivated with the wheat mainly for use on the
farms, ranges from ten to fifteen cents per bushel.
These are facts. The pending question in this discussion is, How much
land, occupied by owners but not now in use, is there in this section
of the country on which similar results can be attained, with better
results by individual farmers who possess mental energy and practical
skill? The figures given by the chiefs of the agricultural experiment
stations may rightly be taken in the solution of this question.
THE COMING OF THE CATBIRD.
BY SPENCER TROTTER.
In southeastern Pennsylvania there comes a day in February that brings
with it an indefinable sense of joyousness. A southerly wind wanders
up the Delaware with a touch of the spring in its air that quickens,
for the first time, the slumbering life. It is then that those
mysterious forces in the cells of living things begin their subtle
work--hidden in the dark, underground storehouses of plants and the
sluggish tissues of animals buried in their winter sleep. On such a
day the ground hog ventures from his burrow, some restless bee is
lured from the hive to wander disconsolate over bare fields, a snake
crawls from its hole to bask awhile in the sunshine, and one looks
instinctively for the first breaking of the earth that tells of the
early crocus and the peeping forth of daffodils. The southerly wind is
more apt than not to be a telltale, for with all its springtime
softness it is drawing toward some storm center, near or remote, that
will inevitably follow with rough weather in its sweep. The country
folk rightly call such a day a "weather breeder," and even the ground
hog knows its portent in the very sign of his shadow. Come as it will,
the day is really a day borrowed in advance from the spring, as though
to hearten one through all the dreary days that will follow and, in
starting the growing forces of vegetation, to make ready for the
season's coming.
With this forerunner of the year come the harbingers of the bird
migration. With the rise of the temperature to sixty or over, a
well-marked bird wave from the south spreads over the Delaware Valley.
On this balmy, springlike day we hear for the first time since
November the croaking of grackles as a loose flock wings overhead or
scatters among the tree tops. A few robins may show themselves, and
the mellow piping of bluebirds lends its sweet influence to the charm
of such a day. There is a sense of uncertain whereabouts in the
bluebird's note, a sort of hazy, in-the-air feeling that suggests sky
space. It does not seem to have the tangible element by which we can
locate the bird as in the voices of the robin and the song sparrow. It
is on such a day as this that song sparrows are first heard--cheery
ditties from the weather-beaten fences and the bare, brown tangle of
brier patches. The day may close lurid with the frayed streamers of
lofty cirrus clouds streaking across the sky--the vaporous overflow of
a coming storm--or a week of the same bright weather may continue with
the wind all the while blowing softly out of the south, but sooner or
later the inevitable winter storm must close this foretaste of the
spring.
A decided wave of rising temperature usually reaches the Delaware
Valley from the middle to the last of March, maintaining itself longer
than the February rise, and ushering in a well-marked bird wave. It is
about this time that the vanguard of the robin migration scatters over
the country. The grackles or crow blackbirds, which have been more or
less in evidence since their first appearance in February, begin
renovating the old nests or laying the foundations of new ones in the
tops of tall pines. The shrill call of the flicker sounds through the
woods, and before the end of the month one is sure to hear the
plaintive song of the field sparrow. This is about the time that the
spicebush shows its yellow blossoms through the grays and browns of
the spring underwoods, and the skunk cabbage unfolds its fresh, green
leafage in rank abundance along the boggy course of woodland rills. A
week earlier the streaked yellow and purple of its fleshy spathes
shows here and there in the oozy ground by the side of the folded leaf
spikes. It is just at this time, too, that one must go to the woods
for the first spring wild flowers--bloodroot, hepatica, anemones, and
the yellow dog-tooth violet--if one would get the real freshness of
spring into his soul. The crows, that all through the winter filed
away each evening in straggling lines of flight toward the distant
roost, have broken ranks, and go rambling in small groups through the
woods and over the fields of green winter wheat. Like the grackles,
they have thoughts of courtship and the more earnest business of
family cares. The liquid notes of meadow larks sound clear and sweet
in the greening fields and pastures, and small flocks of vociferous
killdeers scatter in wheeling flight over the newly plowed lands. In
tangle covers the rustle of dead leaves here and there tells of the
whereabouts of a flock of fox sparrows halting in their northward
pilgrimage. The pewee is back, inspecting her last year's house under
the span of some old bridge, and the melancholy voice of the dove is
borne on the air from the fence rows and cedars along the farther side
of fields.
After the 1st of April the tide of migration sets in with force, and
the earlier waves bring several species of summer birds--those that
come to build and breed in our woods--that rarely if ever make their
appearance before this time. It is an interesting fact that none of
the migrants that make their first appearance in April are ever found
in the Delaware Valley during the winter, though several, if not all,
of the species that come on the March waves are occasionally met with
in the winter months. It appears, further, that the winter quarters of
certain birds which are summer residents with us and some that are
transient, passing on to more northern breeding grounds, lie not so
very far to the south. If the last of March has been marked by warm
weather lapping over into the first days of April, then one may expect
soon to hear the familiar notes of the chipping sparrow from the
swelling branches of garden shrubbery and the trees about the lawn,
and a brown thrasher is sure to be heard volubly proclaiming his
arrival from some near-by tree top. Among the budding sprigs of
thickets the elusive chewink breaks into occasional fragments of song,
and from the red-blossomed maples and the jungle of pussy willows and
alders that fringe the meadow brook the metallic creaking notes of the
red-winged blackbirds sound not unpleasingly. This jargon of the
red-wing has a true vernal ring about it, suggesting the fresh green
of oozy bogs and the loosening up of sap.
From the middle to the last of April there are several big waves of
migration that bring many of the summer residents as well as some
transient species, forerunning the greater waves that are to follow in
May. On certain warm April days the barn and the bank swallows appear,
and the chimney swifts are seen scurrying to and fro above the trees
and house tops. These are genuine signs of the coming summer, for
swallows and swifts feed only on the minute gnats and other ephemera
that develop under conditions of warm temperature. Whoever knows of a
martin box that year after year is visited by its colony has an
unfailing source of delight at this time in watching the lovely birds.
The martins are very prompt in their arrival, rarely coming before the
1st of April nor later than the 10th. We are aware for the first time
that the house wren has come back by the voluble song that greets us
some morning from the branches just beyond our window--a song that
only the lover of his own rooftree can fully appreciate, for the
wren's chant, more than any other bird song, seems to voice the home
instinct in a man. By the last week of April the woods are fast
closing up their vistas in a rich profusion of unfolding leafage. The
umbrellalike leaves of the May apple are scattered everywhere through
the woods and fields, forming conspicuous patches of green. During
this last week of the month a few straggling thrushes make their
appearance--the hermit thrush with its russet tail, the veery, and the
wood thrush. The first two are transients, flitting through the
underwoods or rustling among fallen leaves in search of their insect
food. To hear the incomparable matins and vespers of the hermit one
must follow to the bird's breeding range on the wooded slopes of the
Appalachians or farther into the deep recesses of the Canadian
forests. The wood thrush breeds with us, and the melody of its notes
adds a peculiar charm to our groves and woodlands that would leave an
unfilled blank in the choir if the bird were a transient like the
hermit or the veery.
From the 1st to the 10th of May a succession of bird waves comes from
the south of such vast proportions as to the number of individuals and
variety of species that all the previous migratory waves seem
insignificant in comparison. It is the flood tide of the migration,
bringing with it the host of warblers, vireos, orioles, tanagers, and
thrushes that suddenly make our woods almost tropical in the variety
of richly colored species and strange bird notes. It would take a
volume to describe the wood warblers, sylvan nymphs of such bizarre
color patterns and dainty forms that one is fain to imagine himself in
the heart of some wondrous forest of a far-away land. Their curious
dry notes, each different in its kind and expression, yet all of the
same insectlike quality; their quick, active motions, now twisting
head downward around the branches, prying into every nook and cranny
in their eager search for food, or fluttering about the clusters of
leaves, add to the strange effect. Their names, too, are richly
stimulative to the color sense--the black-throated green, the
black-throated blue, the chestnut-sided, the bay-breasted, the black
and yellow, the cerulean, the Blackburnian, the blue-winged yellow,
the golden-winged, the blue-yellow-backed or parula warbler, and the
Maryland yellow-throat are each suggestive of a wealth of coloring.
Others have names that carry us to southern realms, like the myrtle
and the palm warblers; and others again tell of curious habits, as the
worm-eating warbler, the hooded fly-catching warbler, and the black
and white creeping warbler that scrambles about the tree trunks like a
true creeper. There is nothing in all the year quite like the May
woods. Then, if never again, you can step from your dooryard into an
enchanted forest. The light yellowish effects of new green in the
feathery masses of the oak catkins and the fresh, unfolding leafage of
the forest trees are a rich feast to the eyes. Against this wealth of
green the dogwood spreads its snow-white masses of bloom. In sunlit
spaces of greenness the scarlet flash of a tanager, the rich blue
coloring of the indigo bird, newly arrived from its winter quarters in
South America, and the glimpse of a rose-breasted grosbeak among the
high tree tops are strangely suggestive of a tropical forest. The ear,
too, is charmed with a multitude of curious notes. The weird cries of
the great-crested flycatcher among the topmost branches, and the loud
chant of the ovenbird with its rising cadence coming from farther
depths of the wood are two of the most characteristic bird voices of
the May woodlands. If one would have the famous song of the mocking
bird in this sylvan carnival he has only to loiter in the nearest
grove to hear the wonderful performance of the catbird. The catbird is
the real harbinger of summer. He is familiar throughout the
countryside, liked or disliked according to the dispositions of folks,
but when he appears amid the May-day throng every one knows that
summer has come. As a countryman once said to me: "You can't place any
dependence on the robin--it may snow the very day he comes; but a
catbird never makes a mistake--it's summer with him for sure."
The passing on of the great warbler waves to the north and the ending
of the migration likewise mean the passing of the spring. It is summer
any time after the 15th of May, or, to be more accurate, after the
last of the migratory warblers, thrushes, and tanagers have passed
beyond our woods. To a New-Englander summer will come a little later,
nearer the true almanac date of June 1st. To a dweller in Virginia the
last of April is the passing of spring and the advent of summer.
Some ten or more years ago several enthusiastic ornithologists living
in the neighborhood of Philadelphia began keeping records of the times
of arrival of the different species of birds, and at the same time
noted the conditions of temperature in relation to the abundance of
individuals. After several years of these observations they were able
to see clearly that these bird waves were directly related to the
waves of rising temperature marking the advent of warm spells of
weather. One of the most significant facts deduced from these
observations was the remarkable regularity in the first appearance of
certain species. For example, the Baltimore oriole in eight years of
observation never arrived before the 1st of May, and only twice later
than the 4th--viz., once on the fifth and once on the 7th. The list on
the opposite page shows the date of first arrivals extending over a
period of eight years, from 1885 to 1892.[10]
-------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
| 1885. | 1886. | 1887. | 1888. |
-------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------|
Flicker | April 10 | Mar. 24 | Mar. 26 | Mar. 30 |
Chimney swift | April 22 | April 23 | April 22 | April 20 |
Hummingbird | April 29 | May 12 | May 12 | May 14 |
Kingbird | May 6 | May 11 | May 7 | May 6 |
Crested flycatcher | May 2 | May 12 | May 3 | May 1 |
Pewee | April 3 | Mar. 20 | Mar. 21 | Mar. 22 |
Wood pewee | May 6 | May 15 | April 30 | May 13 |
Red-winged | | | | |
blackbird | Mar. 4 | Feb. 19 | Feb. 19 | Feb. 21 |
Meadow lark | ....... | Feb. 10 | Mar. 19 | Mar. 21 |
Baltimore oriole | May 5 | May 4 | May 2 | May 2 |
Purple grackle | Mar. 16 | Mar. 7 | Feb. 19 | Feb. 21 |
Chipping sparrow | April 8 | April 9 | April 8 | Mar. 31 |
Field sparrow | April 11 | April 7 | April 9 | April 2 |
Chewink | April 22 | April 23 | April 27 | April 18 |
Indigo bird | May 16 | May 11 | May 7 | May 12 |
Scarlet tanager | May 9 | May 12 | May 5 | May 8 |
Barn swallow | April 22 | April 19 | April 21 | April 12 |
Red-eyed vireo | May 7 | May 11 | May 4 | April 29 |
Black-and-white | | | | |
warbler | April 30 | May 4 | April 27 | April 21 |
Yellow warbler | May 6 | May 4 | May 2 | May 5 |
Myrtle warbler | May 2 | April 10 | May 2 | April 25 |
Black-throated | | | | |
green warbler | May 2 | May 11 | May 5 | April 26 |
Ovenbird | April 30 | May 3 | April 29 | April 30 |
Maryland | | | | |
yellow-throat | April 29 | April 24 | April 28 | April 30 |
Chat | May 2 | May 12 | May 5 | May 5 |
Redstart | May 2 | May 4 | May 3 | May 1 |
Catbird | May 2 | May 4 | May 3 | May 5 |
Brown thrasher | April 24 | April 25 | April 28 | April 15 |
House wren | May 3 | April 27 | April 24 | April 28 |
Wood thrush | May 2 | May 1 | May 1 | May 1 |
Veery | ....... | May 11 | April 25 | May 3 |
Hermit thrush | April 13 | April 7 | April 9 | April 3 |
Robin | Mar. 7 | Mar. 10 | Feb. 28 | Feb. 19 |
Bluebird | Mar. 18 | ....... | Feb. 17 | Feb. 21 |
-------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------+
-------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------
| 1889. | 1890. | 1891. | 1892.
-------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------
Flicker | Mar. 28 | Mar. 26 | Mar. 30 | April 2
Chimney swift | April 15 | April 22 | April 16 | April 27
Hummingbird | ....... | May 7 | May 11 | .......
Kingbird | May 6 | May 14 | May 1 | May 4
Crested flycatcher | May 8 | May 1 | April 30 | May 3
Pewee | Mar. 27 | Mar. 27 | Mar. 31 | April 3
Wood pewee | May 12 | May 14 | May 6 | May 17
Red-winged | | | |
blackbird | Mar. 13 | Mar. 12 | Feb. 25 | Mar. 9
Meadow lark | Mar. 14 | Mar. 12 | Feb. 23 | Mar. 17
Baltimore oriole | May 7 | May 1 | May 1 | May 3
Purple grackle | Mar. 2 | Feb. 13 | Feb. 18 | Mar. 6
Chipping sparrow | Mar. 29 | April 8 | April 13 | April 4
Field sparrow | Mar. 29 | Mar. 13 | Mar. 15 | Mar. 26
Chewink | April 11 | May 1 | April 18 | April 24
Indigo bird | May 12 | May 10 | May 8 | May 10
Scarlet tanager | May 9 | May 4 | April 28 | May 3
Barn swallow | April 22 | April 19 | April 19 | April 24
Red-eyed vireo | May 5 | April 30 | May 2 | May 3
Black-and-white | | | |
warbler | April 20 | April 30 | April 24 | May 1
Yellow warbler | May 11 | May 1 | May 8 | May 4
Myrtle warbler | April 20 | April 27 | April 18 | April 7
Black-throated | | | |
green warbler | May 5 | May 2 | April 19 | April 30
Ovenbird | May 3 | May 3 | April 29 | April 30
Maryland | | | |
yellow-throat | May 6 | April 30 | May 1 | May 3
Chat | May 11 | May 5 | May 1 | May 3
Redstart | May 4 | May 3 | April 29 | April 30
Catbird | May 5 | May 5 | May 4 | April 30
Brown thrasher | April 22 | April 30 | April 19 | April 30
House wren | April 14 | April 30 | April 19 | May 5
Wood thrush | May 3 | April 30 | April 23 | May 2
Veery | May 6 | May 2 | April 28 | May 4
Hermit thrush | April 10 | April 13 | April 12 | April 3
Robin | Mar. 7 | Feb. 26 | Feb. 24 | Mar. 9
Bluebird | Mar. 8 | Feb. 23 | Feb. 17 | Mar. 9
-------------------+----------+----------+----------+---------
Another fact of great interest which bears on the south-to-north
movement of migrating birds, and which these observations very clearly
brought out, was the earlier appearance of individuals of various
species at points nearer the river, the first arrival of the same
species at points back from the river being, in many instances,
several days later. The first report of the arrival of a given species
usually came from a low, marshy tract of land immediately bordering
the western shore of the Delaware. The second report came from a
locality several miles back of the eastern shore of the river, but
situated in the low plain of the river valley and within tide-water
limits. The third report came from a place some miles back from the
river on the uplands, but near the head of a stream emptying into the
Delaware from the west. The last two places to report arrivals were
situated farther up the river and some distance back from it. All this
confirms the general idea that in migrating most, if not all, of the
various land birds follow river valleys and invade the upland
districts, lying back from either side, by way of the smaller
tributaries.
The fact of greatest importance resulting from these observations was
that relating to temperature. It was found that there was always a
marked increase in the number of individuals of a given species
following a warm wave of temperature as marked by a decided rise of
the thermometer. The following graphic representation, based on the
abundance from day to day of three common and easily observed
species--the brown thrasher, chipping sparrow, and flicker--affords an
interesting illustration of the relative movements of the two waves.
It will be understood that the numbers in the extreme left-hand column
refer to the relative abundance of individuals of the three species
collectively. The inside column refers to temperature. The period of
observation was twenty days, as shown by the line across the top of
the figure.[11]
[Illustration: A, migration; B, temperature.]
The advent of spring is marked by the northward progression of the
isotherm of 42.8° F., which is the initial temperature required to
awaken the dormant reproductive and germinating activities in animals
and plants. With the gradual invasion of the United States, from the
south northward, by temperatures above this, there passes over the
different regions the ever-old but ever-new panorama of the spring
with its opening blossoms, its unfolding green, and its waves of
migrating birds. The restlessness produced by the periodic development
of the reproductive function under the stimulus of increased
temperature causes the highly organized bird life to spread out from
its winter quarters, wherever those may be, and follow the zone of new
green that steadily widens northward with its increase of food supply
in the form of myriads of insects. The comparative regularity in the
recurrence of this phenomenon year after year is attested by the
observations just noted. Each species has a certain, definite
physiological relation to temperature, and its migratory movement
toward the breeding ground is determined by the movement of the
isotherm of this temperature. Just as warm a spell of weather may
occur in early April as in the first week of May, but it does not
represent the permanent summer rise; and the majority of the warblers,
the catbird, the tanager, the rose-breasted grosbeak, the two species
of oriole, the vireos, and the kingbird, are rarely if ever seen in
abundance in the Delaware Valley before the 1st of May. The migratory
movement of such species is as regular as any other periodic
phenomenon in Nature.
It is hard to realize the enormous multitude of birds that form a
so-called "wave." During the whole period of migration there is a
general northward movement of all the migratory species, but under the
influence of warm spells of weather this more or less uniform movement
rises into a vast wavelike sweep of birds. These bird waves, as
already noted, _follow_ the rise of temperature appearing at any given
locality about a day or two after the first day of the warm spell.
Many species of land birds migrate at night--such, for example, as the
orioles, tanagers, warblers, vireos, wrens, the majority of the
finches, the woodpeckers, and the thrushes, excepting the robin.
During the passing of one of the May waves the darkness overhead is
alive with flying birds. One may stand for hours at a time and hear
the incessant chirping and twittering of hundreds of birds calling to
one another through the night as though to keep from getting
separated. The great mass of individuals are probably guided by these
call notes.
The usually accepted notion that birds migrate from south to north in
traveling to their breeding grounds is largely true of shore birds and
waterfowl, but among many of the species of land birds conditions of
topography tend to deflect a direct northward movement. The Atlantic
coast plain, reaching up into southern New Jersey, and the Mississippi
basin, each offers a broad south-to-north highway for birds leaving
the Gulf shores of the United States on their northward journey in the
spring. A great majority of species find in the wilderness of the
Appalachian highland, from the Catskills to Georgia, breeding grounds
quite as well adapted to their needs as the forests of Maine and
Canada. Large numbers of birds, according to their regional relations,
will constantly turn from the Atlantic coast plain up the numerous
rivers, which become great highways of migration, leading to the
highlands. The northward movement has thus a large westerly deflection
on the Atlantic slope of the middle United States. It is also quite
certain that many birds winter in favorable localities on the Atlantic
coast plain much farther north than is generally supposed. This is
especially true of the holly thickets among the coastwise sand dunes
of southern New Jersey and the cedar swamps and pine barrens in the
vicinity of Cape May. Many of the finches, the marsh wrens,
red-winged blackbirds, meadow larks, thrashers, and myrtle warblers
are frequently seen in these localities through the winter. I spent
one first day of February some years ago among the dunes below
Atlantic City, N. J. At Philadelphia that morning it was bleak winter
weather, but two hours later we found ourselves in a warm expanse of
sunlight on the seaward beaches. The balmy air was filled with bird
notes, and the holly thickets and bay bushes fairly swarmed with
myrtle warblers. It seems to be a fact that many birds thus make
comparatively short migratory movements between the seacoast plain and
the mountains, up and down the river valleys.
The phenomenon of the migrating bird has always appealed in a
wonderful manner to the human mind. The guiding geographical sense
that all animals, and wild animals and birds in particular, possess is
peculiarly attractive to men of civilized society, because they have
largely lost this same natural instinct of direction, and now look
upon it in wonderment. Birds have very sure landmarks; their senses
are keen for noting features of topography. They undoubtedly know the
Potomac, the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Hudson, and the
Connecticut, and never confuse one with another. They know to which
side the sea lies and that the rivers flow down from a wild, wooded
region where there are plenty of food and the best possible places to
raise their young. All these facts get fixed in their brains. The
bird's brain-cell structure is built on these lines and is only
waiting to get the impressions of the first migratory experience. They
keep in with one another, follow their chirpings in the night, learn
to tell the Hudson from the Delaware, or where this or that stretch of
woodland lies, just as they learned when first out of the nest how to
tell good from bad sorts of food, or how to find their way about the
home woods, and that an owl or a fox was an undesirable acquaintance.
In the fall migration the young birds follow the older ones in the
general movement southward, and are often belated, showing that the
impulse to leave their birthplaces is forced upon them, rather from
necessity than choice, and is not the well-developed instinct
impressed by former experience which their elders seem to possess. The
old birds who have bred and reared these young ones set the example of
early departure which the birds of the year through inexperience are
tardy in appreciating. The habit waits upon experience.
Each year, from midwinter, when the first warmth of advancing sunlight
calls to the sleeping life, on to the first fervid heat of the
reproductive summer, we have the joyous pageant of the spring. This
steady waxing of the new light appealed to the pagan mind of western
Europe with a far deeper sense than the modern mind can appreciate. To
our rude ancestors it was the goddess Eástre, bountiful in her gift
of warmth and the magic of reproductive life, that each year came with
the light to drive away the frost giants. And with the goddess, whom
we still love to picture as a maiden tripping lightly through the
budding groves in her wind-blown garments, came the birds. It was the
cuckoo that brought the summer with "daisies pied and violets blue,"
and to-day, when its voice is heard for the first time in the year,
every one knows that summer has come again to the hedgerows of England
and the lands of the Rhine. So with us across the Atlantic, summer
comes when the catbird first pours out its babel of sweet notes in
green woodland ways and the tangled nooks of old gardens.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Prepared under
the direction of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club. By Witmer
Stone. Philadelphia, 1894.
[11] Stone. The Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
GUESSING, AS INFLUENCED BY NUMBER PREFERENCES.
BY F. B. DRESSLAR.
About two years ago a certain progressive clothing company of Los
Angeles, California, procured a very large squash--so large, indeed,
as to attract much attention. This they placed uncut in a window of
their place of business, and advertised that they would give one
hundred dollars in gold to the one guessing the number of seeds it
contained. In case two or more persons guessed the correct number, the
money was to be divided equally among them. The only prerequisite for
an opportunity to guess was that the one wishing to guess should walk
inside and register his name, address, and his guess in the notebook
kept for that purpose.
The result of this offer was that 7,700 people registered guesses, and
but three of these guessed 811, the number of seeds which the squash
contained.
It occurred to me that a study of these guesses would reveal some
interesting number preferences, if any existed, for the conditions
were unusually favorable for calling forth naïve and spontaneous
results, there being no way of approximating the number of seeds by
calculation, and very little or no definite experience upon which to
rely for guidance. It seemed probable, therefore, that the guesses
would cover a wide range, and by reason of this furnish evidence of
whatever number preference might exist. It is undoubtedly safe to
assume, too, that the guesses made were honest attempts to state as
nearly as possible best judgments under conditions given; but even if
some of the guesses were more or less facetiously made, the data would
be equally valuable for the main purpose in hand.
According to the theory of probability, had there been no preference
at all for certain digits or certain combinations of digits within
the limits of the guesses, one figure would occur about as often as
another in units' or tens' place. It was argued, therefore, that any
marked or persistent variation from such regularity in such a great
number of cases would reveal what might be termed an unconscious
preference for such numbers or digits for these places.
The purpose of this study, then, was to determine whether or not there
existed in the popular mind, under the conditions offered, any such
preferences.
After the very arduous and tedious task of collating and classifying
all the guesses for men and women separately had been done, the
following facts appeared:
In the first place, marked preference is shown for certain digits both
for units' and tens' places. This statement is based on a study of the
6,863 guesses falling below one thousand. Of these, 4,238 were made by
men and 2,625 were made by women. By tabulations of the digits used in
units' place by both men and women, the following facts have been
determined: 800 used 9, while but 374 used 8; 1,070 used 7, and 443
preferred 6; 881 used 5, and only 295 preferred 4; 862 chose 3, while
331 used 2; 577 ended with 1, while 1,230 preferred 0 as the last
figure.
A tabulation of the figures used in tens' place shows, save in the
case of 2 and 3, where 2 is used oftener than 3, the same curious
preferences, but in a much less marked degree. To go into detail, 850
chose 9 for tens' place, while 559 took 8; 907 used 7, while only 637
selected 6; 748 took 5, while only 536 used 4; 601 used 3, and 634
chose 2; 728 used 1, as against 872 who used 0.
Were it not that the selections here in the main correspond with the
preferences shown in units' place, the significance of these figures
would be much less important; but the evidence here can not wholly be
ignored when taken in connection with the facts obtained in the
preferences shown in the case of the figures occupying units' place.
We are enabled, then, as a result of the study of these guesses, to
say that under the conditions offered, aside from a preference of 0
over 1 to end the numbers selected, digits representing odd numbers
are conspicuously preferred to those representing even numbers. How
far this will hold under other conditions can not now be stated, but
the facts here observed are of such a nature as to suggest the
possibility of an habitual tendency in this direction. However,
further investigations can alone determine whether or not this bias
for certain numbers is potent in a general way.
The curve on the next page, exhibiting the results noted above, shows
at a glance the marked and persistent preference for the odd numbers.
It will be noticed that of the digits preferred, 7 surpasses any of
the others. Not only, then, do we tend to select an odd number for
units' place when the guess ranges between one and a thousand, but of
these digits 7 is much preferred. In connection with this fact one
immediately recalls all he has heard about 7 as a sacred number, and
its professed significance in the so-called "occult sciences." I think
one is warranted in saying from an introspective point of view that
there is a shadow of superstition present in all attempts at pure
guessing. There appears to be some unexpressed feeling of lucky
numbers or some mental easement when one unreasoned position is taken
rather than any other.
[Illustration: CHOICE OF DIGITS IN TENS' AND UNITS' PLACES (MEN AND
WOMEN).
Vertical distance shows the number of times the figure on the
horizontal line immediately below was used.]
It is impossible on the evidence furnished by this study to give more
than hints at the probable reason for the preference here indicated.
But it is worth while to glance backward to earlier conditions, when
the scientific attitude toward all the facts of life and mind was far
more subordinated to supernatural interpretations than it is to-day.
In this way we may catch a thread which still binds us to habits
formed in the indefinite past.
The Greeks considered the even numbers as representative of the
feminine principle, and as belonging and applying to things
terrestrial. To them the odd numbers were endowed with a masculine
virtue, which in time was strengthened into supernatural and celestial
qualities. The same belief was prevalent among the Chinese. With them
even numbers were connected with earthly things, partaking of the
feminine principle of Yang. Odd numbers were looked upon as proceeding
out of the divine and endued with the masculine principle. Thirty was
called the number of earth, because it was made up by the addition of
the even numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. On the other hand, 25, the sum of
the five odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, was called the number of
heaven.
It is generally true that, as lower peoples developed the need of
numbers and the power to use them, certain of these numbers came to be
surrounded with a superstitious importance and endued with certain
qualities which led at once to numerical preferences more or less
dominant in all their thinking connected with numbers.
It would certainly be unjustifiable to conclude from the evidence at
hand that the preferences shown in the guesses under consideration are
directly traceable to some such superstition; and yet one can scarcely
prevent himself from linking them vaguely together. Especially is this
true when some consideration is given to a probable connecting link as
shown in our modern superstitious notions. I have found through a
recent study of these superstitions that where numbers are introduced,
the odd are used to the almost complete exclusion of the even. For
example, I have collected and tabulated a series of more than sixty
different superstitions using odd numbers, and have found but four
making use of the even. Besides these specific examples there are many
more which in some form or another express the belief that odd numbers
have some vital relation with luck both good and bad.
It would be impossible to define precisely or even approximately just
what sort of a mental state the word "luck" stands for, but one
element in its composition is a more or less naïve belief in
supernatural and occult influences which at one time work for and at
another time against the believer. In its more pronounced forms, the
belief in luck lifts itself into a sort of a blind dependence upon
some ministering spirit which interposes between rational causes and
their effects. In a way one may say that the more or less vague and
shadowy notions of luck which float in the minds of people to-day are
but the emaciated and famishing forms of a once all-embracing
superstition, and that these shadows possess a potency over life and
action oftentimes beyond our willingness to believe.
There is another interesting and somewhat curious thing to be noticed
in connection with these guesses. There is a persistent tendency to
the duplication of digits, or, if one thinks of the numbers as at
first conceived in terms of language, a tendency to alliteration. For
example, the numbers 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, and 999
occur oftener by sixty-seven per cent than any other combination
possible in the tens thus represented. That is to say, other things
equal, one would have a right to expect 334 or 332 to occur as often
as 333. But the fact is, in this particular case, 333 occurred
forty-eight times, while the other two put together occurred only
three times. Here, however, we have the combined influence of the
preference for the odd over the even and the digital sequence. Still,
if we select 444, we find that this number, made up though it is of
three digits in general least selected of all, the preference for
alliterative effect is strong enough to make the number occur 28 times
to 14 times for both 443 and 445. If we take 777, we find that it was
used more times than all the other combinations from 770 to 779
inclusive, put together.
Therefore, under conditions similar to those presented for these
guesses, one would be safe to expect these duplicative or alliterative
numbers to occur much oftener than any other single number in the
series.
It would evidently be unsafe to generalize upon the basis of this
study, notwithstanding the large number of guesses considered.
However, it seems to me that the results here obtained at least
suggest a field of inquiry which promises interesting returns. If it
be true, as here suggested, that odd numbers are preferred by
guessers, advantage could be taken of this preference in many ways.
Furthermore, as I suspect, it may be that this probable preference
points to a habit of mind which more or less influences results not
depending strictly on guessing. It has been shown, for example, that
the length of criminal sentences has been largely affected by
preferences for 5 or multiples of 5--that is to say, where judges have
power to fix the length of sentence within certain limits, there is a
strong probability that they will be influenced in their judgments by
the habitual use of 5 or its multiples. Here it would seem that
unconscious preference overrides what one has a right to consider the
most careful and impartial judgments possible, based upon actual and
well-digested data.[12]
Another thing is noticeable in these guesses. The consciousness of
number beyond 1,000 falls off very rapidly. The difference in the
values of 1,000 and 1,500 seems to have had less weight with the
guessers than a difference of 50 had at any place below 1,000. And so,
in a way, 1,000 seems to mark the limit of any sort of definite mental
measurement. This fact is more and more emphasized as the numbers
representing the guesses increase until one can see there exists
absolutely no conception of the value of numbers. For example, many
guessed 1,000,000, while several guessed more than 10,000,000.
Guessing means, with many people, no attempt at any sort of reasonable
measurement, but rather an attempt to express their guess in such a
way as to afford them the greatest amount of mental relief. And this
relief can not be wholly accomplished without satisfying number
preferences. Therefore, guessing is likely to exhibit, in a greater or
less degree, some habitual lines of preference subject to
predetermination. It may be that much practical advantage has been
taken of these facts in games of chance where number selections play
an important part.
FOOTNOTE:
[12] See H. Le Poer. Influence of Number in Criminal Sentences.
Harper's Weekly, May 14, 1896.
CONCERNING WEASELS.
BY WILLIAM E. CRAM.
[Illustration: A Weasel standing on the ground]
Why is it that while popular fancy has attributed all sorts of uncanny
and supernatural qualities to owls and cats, and that no ghost story
or tale of horrid murder has been considered quite complete without
its rat peering from some dark corner, or spider with expanded legs
suddenly spinning down from among the rafters, no such grewsome
association has ever attached itself to the weasels, creatures whose
every habit and characteristic would seem to suggest something of the
sort? Now, fond as I am of cats, I should never think of denying that
they are uncanny creatures, to say the least. But, suppose it was the
custom of our domestic tabbies to vanish abruptly or even gradually on
occasion, like the Cheshire cat after its interview with Alice, that
would at least furnish some excuse for the general prejudice against
them, but would really be no more than some of our commonest weasels
do whenever it serves their purpose. I remember one summer afternoon I
was trout-fishing along a little brook that ran between pine-covered
hills. As I lay stretched on the bank at the foot of a great maple I
saw a weasel run along in the brush fence some distance away. A few
seconds later he was standing on the exposed root of the tree hardly a
yard from my eyes. I lay motionless and examined the beautiful
creature minutely, till suddenly I found myself staring at the smooth
greenish-gray root of the maple with no weasel in sight. Judging from
my own experience, I should say that this is the usual termination of
any chance observations of either weasels or minks.
Occasionally they may be seen to dart into the bushes or behind some
log or projecting bank, but much more frequently they vanish with a
suddenness that defies the keenest eyesight.
[Illustration: A weasel lying on a branch]
In all probability this vanishing is accomplished by extreme rapidity
of motion, but if this is the case then the creature succeeds in doing
something utterly impossible to any other warm-blooded animal of its
size. Mice, squirrels, and some of the smaller birds are all of them
swift enough at times, but except in the case of the humming bird none
of them, I believe, succeed in accomplishing the result achieved by
the weasels. The humming bird, in spite of its small size, leaves us a
pretty definite impression of the direction it has taken when it darts
away; but when a mink, half a yard in length and weighing several
pounds, stands motionless before one with his dark coat conspicuous
against almost any background, and the next instant is gone without a
rustle or the tremor of a blade of grass, it leaves one with an
impression of witchcraft difficult to dispel; and best appreciated
when one sees it for one's self. Nor is the everyday life of the
weasel quiet or commonplace; his one object in life apparently is to
kill, first to appease his hunger, then to satisfy his thirst for warm
blood, and after that for the mere joy of killing.
[Illustration: A white weasel]
The few opportunities I have had for observing these animals have
never shown them occupied in any other way, nor can any hint of
anything different be gained from the various writers on the subject,
while accounts of their attacking and even killing human beings in a
kind of blind fury are too numerous and apparently well authenticated
to be entirely ignored. These attacks are said usually to be made by a
number of weasels acting in concert, and the motive would appear to be
revenge for some injury done to one of their number. There seems to be
something peculiar about the entire family of weasels. The American
sable or pine marten is said to have strange ways that have puzzled
naturalists and hunters for years. In the wilderness no amount of
trapping has any effect on their numbers, nor do they show any
especial fear of man or his works, occasionally even coming into
lumber camps at night and being especially fond of old logging roads
and woods that have been swept by fire; but at the slightest hint of
approaching civilization they disappear, not gradually, but at once
and forever, and the woods know them no more. If there is anything in
the theory of the survival of the fittest, why is it that not one
marten has discovered that, like other animals of its size, it could
manage to live comfortably enough in the vicinity of man? The mink and
otter still follow the course of every brook and river and manage to
avoid the keen eyes of the duck hunter, while for six months in the
year their paths are sprinkled with steel traps set either especially
for them or for the more plebeian muskrat. If a pair of sables could
be persuaded to take up their quarters in some parts of New England
they could travel for dozens of miles through dark evergreen woods
with hollow and decaying trees in abundance, while at present there
are almost no traps set in a manner that need disturb creatures of
their habits. Partridges, rabbits, and squirrels, which form their
principal food, are nearly if not quite as abundant as before the
country was settled, so that it would certainly not require any very
decided change of habits to enable them to exist, but evidently the
root of the matter goes deeper than that, and, like some tribes of
Indians, it is impossible for them to multiply or flourish except in
the primeval forest.
[Illustration: A weasel on the ground]
The common weasel or ermine, which is the only kind I have seen
hereabouts, would seem to have everything on its side in the struggle
for existence, and when one happens to be killed by some larger
inhabitant of the woods it must be due entirely to its own
carelessness. Nevertheless, they do occasionally fall victims to owls
and foxes, and I once shot a red-tailed hawk that was in the act of
devouring one. Still, these casualties among weasels are probably few
and far between. Fortunately, however, they never increase to any
great extent. Occasionally in the winter the snow for miles will be
covered with their tracks all made in a single night, and then for
weeks not a track is to be seen; but usually they prefer to hunt
alone, each having its beat a mile or more in length, over which it
travels back and forth throughout the season, passing any given point
at intervals of two or three days. This habit of keeping to the same
route instead of wandering at random about the woods is
characteristic of the family, the length of the route depending to a
certain extent on the size of the animal. The mink is usually about a
week in going his rounds, and may cover a dozen miles in that time,
while the otter is generally gone a fortnight or three weeks. When it
is possible the ermine prefers to follow the course of old tumble-down
stone walls, and lays its course accordingly. In favorable districts
he is able to keep to these for miles together, squeezing into the
smallest crevices in pursuit of mice or chipmunks. All the weasels
travel in a similar manner--that is, by a series of leaps or bounds in
such a way that the hind feet strike exactly in the prints made by the
fore paws, so that the tracks left in the snow are peculiar and bear a
strong family resemblance. On soft snow the slender body of the ermine
leaves its imprint extending from one pair of footprints to the next,
and as these are from four to six feet apart, or even more, the
impression left in the snow is like the track of some extremely long
and slender serpent with pairs of short legs at intervals along its
body. I have said that the ermine is the only true weasel I have found
in this vicinity, but this is not strictly true, at least I hope not.
One winter I repeatedly noticed the tracks of an exceedingly large
weasel--so very large, in fact, that I was almost forced to believe
them to be those of a mink. The impression of its body in the snow was
quite as large as that made by a small mink, but the footprints
themselves were smaller, and the creature appeared to avoid the water
in a manner quite at variance with the well-known habits of its more
amphibious cousin, while, unlike the common weasel, it never followed
stone walls or fences. I put my entire mind to the capture of the
little beast, and set dozens of traps, but it was well along in the
month of March before I succeeded. It proved to be a typical specimen
of the Western long-tailed weasel, though I can find no account of any
other having been taken east of the Mississippi. Its entire length was
about eighteen inches; the tail, which was a little over six, gave the
effect at first glance of being tipped with gray instead of black, but
a closer inspection showed that the black hairs were confined to the
very extremity and were partly concealed by the overlying white ones;
the rest of the fur was white, with a slight reddish tinge, and much
longer and coarser than that of an ermine. Since then I have
occasionally seen similar tracks, but have not succeeded in capturing
a second specimen. In all probability the least weasel is also to be
found here if one has the patience to search carefully enough; none,
however, have come under my observation as yet. All the small weasels
that I have seen have proved on close inspection to be young ermines
with thickly furred black-tipped tails; in the least weasel the tail
is thinly covered with short hair and without any black whatever. Late
in the autumn or early in the winter the ermine changes from
reddish-brown to white, sometimes slightly washed with greenish-yellow
or cream color, and again as brilliantly white as anything in Nature
or art; the end of the tail, however, remains intensely black, and at
first thought might be supposed to make the animal conspicuous on the
white background of snow, but in reality has just the opposite effect.
Place an ermine on new-fallen snow in such a way that it casts no
shadow, and you will find that the black point holds your eye in spite
of yourself, and that at a little distance it is quite impossible to
follow the outline of the weasel itself. Cover the tail with snow, and
you can begin to make out the position of the rest of the animal, but
as long as the tip of the tail is in sight you see that and that only.
The ptarmigan and northern hare also retain some spot or point of dark
color when they take on their winter dress, and these dark points
undoubtedly serve the same purpose as in the case of the ermine.
[Illustration: A weasel catching a bird]
An old hunter, one of the closest observers of Nature I have ever
known, once told me that female minks hibernated in winter in the same
manner as bears, though it was his belief that, unlike the bears, they
never brought forth their young at that season. At first I refused to
take the slightest stock in what he said; the whole thing appeared so
absurd and so utterly at variance with the teachings of those
naturalists who have made the closest possible study of the habits of
minks. Since then, however, I have kept my eyes open for any hint that
might have the slightest bearing on the subject, and to my surprise
have found many things that would seem to point to the correctness of
the old hunter's theory. To begin with, he said that late in the
winter he had repeatedly known female minks to make their appearance
from beneath snow that had lain undisturbed for days or even weeks,
the tracks apparently beginning where he first observed them, the
difference in size between the two sexes being sufficient to make it
easy to distinguish between their tracks at a glance; and, moreover,
since he first began trapping he had noticed that while the sexes were
about equally abundant in the autumn, the females always became very
scarce at the approach of winter and remained so until spring, when
they suddenly increased in numbers and became much the more abundant
of the two.
[Illustration: A weasel on a log]
This is also the experience of trappers in general, and may be
verified by any one who cares to take the trouble to look into the
matter. Evidently no one has ever discovered a mink in a state of
hibernation; at any rate, no such case appears ever to have been
reported; but this does not necessarily prove that it is not a regular
habit among them.
The cry of the mink is seldom heard, even in places where they are
fairly abundant, as they have evidently learned that the greatest
safety lies in silence. It is a peculiarly shrill, rattling,
whistlelike scream, that can be heard at a considerable distance.
CARE OF THE THROAT AND EAR.
BY W. SCHEPPEGRELL, A. M., M. D.,
PRESIDENT WESTERN OPTHALMOLOGIC AND OTO-LARYNGOLOGIC ASSOCIATION, NEW
ORLEANS, LA.
Hygiene is that branch of medical science which relates to the
preservation and improvement of the health. As the prevention of
disease is more important than its cure--in fact, superior to all
methods for its cure--this is a subject which demands our most earnest
attention. Hygiene is not limited to the preservation and improvement
of the health of the individual, but includes that of whole
communities. As, however, the health of a community depends upon the
state of the health of the various families composing it, and this
again of its members, the proper understanding of the hygienic laws by
each individual is of the utmost importance.
For some reason, however, the subject of hygiene or the prevention of
disease does not create the enthusiasm caused by methods advocated for
its cure. A Koch, who publishes to the world a supposed means of
curing tuberculosis, or a Behring, who introduces the serum therapy of
diphtheria, arouses an interest which is limited only by the four
corners of the world. The modest worker in sanitation, however, who
explains the means of the development of these diseases, and the
conditions and laws by means of which they may be prevented, is looked
upon without interest and frequently with disfavor. But in spite of
these conditions, the laws of hygiene are gradually becoming more
farspread, and their influence is felt more with each advancing year.
The nose, throat, and ear are so intimately connected with the other
parts of the body that their health depends to a large extent upon the
condition of the system in general. The laws of hygiene and their
application which refer to the body in general are also applicable to
these parts, and whatever condition benefits the former will have a
useful influence on the upper respiratory passages, and, inversely,
any injurious effect will injure the health of these organs.
The physiology of this region is of much importance. Formerly the nose
was considered principally in its relation to the organ of smell. This
is a most important function, as it is a constant sentinel over the
air we breathe and the food we eat. It is a curious circumstance that
many of the functions that are referred to the organ of taste really
belong to that of smell. In eating ice cream, for instance, the sense
of taste simply informs us that it is sweet or otherwise, but the
flavor is perceived only by the sense of smell. A proof of this is
that where this function is destroyed, all ability in this direction
disappears, and the patient thus affected will frequently complain
that his sense of taste is defective, not realizing that it is the
sense of smell which performs this act.
The nose, however, has a much more important function to
perform--viz., in respiration. Strange to say, however, this has only
recently been realized, and it is even yet not well understood. You
have all observed that, when you had a severe "cold" which prevented
nasal breathing, the next morning the mouth and throat were dry and
parched and frequently inflamed, the voice sometimes hoarse, and there
was a general feeling of depression. While the progress of the
inflammatory process may be a factor in this, still the mechanical
obstruction of the nose from any cause whatsoever will have a similar
effect. In patients in whom, for various reasons, an artificial
opening has been made in the trachea, the air of the room has to be
heated to an almost intolerable point and saturated with moisture, or
severe bronchial inflammation will soon develop in the patient, simply
because the nose has not taken an active part in the act of
respiration. These effects, therefore, clearly demonstrate that the
nasal passages have an important function to perform in the breathing
process. Summarized in a few words, it is simply to warm, moisten, and
clean the air which we inhale.
The healthy nostrils are anatomically and physiologically so formed
that when the current of air passes through them it will have been
freed of its mechanical impurities, warmed to within a few degrees of
the temperature of the body, and moistened to saturation. This has
been experimentally demonstrated.
The opening of the passage of the ear into the throat has several
objects, the most important being ventilation and the adjustment of
the atmospheric equilibrium. This passage leads outward until it
enters the cavity of the middle ear, which is closed by the drum on
the outside, thus separating it from the external canal of the ear. We
know that atmospheric pressure varies at different times and in
different altitudes. It is much less, for instance, at the top of a
mountain than at the seaside. The opening into the throat allows the
air to enter, and adjusts the atmospheric pressure within the ear to
these various external conditions. Those of you who have ascended
Lookout Mountain by means of the incline cable car may have noticed
the adjustment taking place by a peculiar click when different
altitudes were reached.
So intimately are the nose, throat, and ear connected that it is
unusual to find one affected to any considerable extent without the
others being involved. While the rules of hygiene in general are
applicable to the nose, throat, and ear, there are certain special
conditions which deserve consideration. One of the most common causes
of injurious effects to the nose, throat, and ear is the so-called
"cold." The cold in this connection is, of course, understood to be
simply the cause, the condition itself being a peculiar inflammation
of the parts concerned. As cold is so frequently a cause of diseases
of these parts, it would be well to consider under what circumstances
it develops and the best mode of prevention.
I have often noticed that persons who suffer most frequently and
severely from colds usually insist that they exercise the greatest
care to avoid exposure. They have dressed in the warmest clothing,
wrapped the neck in the heaviest mufflers, remained in the closest
rooms, and avoided every draught, and yet they continually "take
cold." The street urchin, on the other hand, with only two or three
garments and without shoes, and who lives out of doors, suffers less
frequently from this affection.
"Colds" have truly been called a product of modern civilization. The
trouble was rare among the aborigines and is more common among the
cultured than among the laboring classes. If we make a plant an
exotic, we must keep it in the conservatory, and even here it is not
free from danger. On the other hand, if we wish to harden it and make
it proof against atmospheric and climatic changes, we must prepare it
by judicious exposure for these conditions. The warm clothing which is
thought to be a protection against cold is frequently the most fertile
cause. It relaxes the body, moistens the skin, and the perspiration
which is induced especially prepares the unresisting body for its
attacks. This applies especially to warm covering around the neck, to
which
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